Monday, 23 January 2023
Thursday, 19 January 2023
The Mercy Seat
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Monday, 16 January 2023
Grant
can make a person.
Were it not for
of Ulysses S. Grant.
"Now, at first The War in The West was essentially fought with gunboats, little ironclad gunboats, and armies on the land. But the first major conflicts in the West were to try to hold, on the side of the Confederacy, and to take, on the northern side, two forts, one called Fort Donelson and one called Fort Henry; one on the Cumberland, one on the Tennessee River. These rivers were terribly important for transportation now, especially military transportation. They flowed down to Nashville, one of them. The other flowed southward and then into Northern Georgia. These rivers would be invasion corridors, if you like, invasion paths for the Northern armies. They were extremely important for supply and transportation, for the South. And hence these relatively small forts that guarded these two rivers suddenly became the focal point by February 1862. The Union forces that would attack Fort Henry first, and then Ford Donelson, were commanded by a young, only in his early forties, General who had been promoted rapidly from Colonel, named Ulysses S. Grant.
Now Grant, as many of you may know — well, Grant has had a huge revival in scholarship in the last, oh, two decades. He was for a long time all but forgotten in American history, partly because his presidency was so awful — and we’ll deal with that later on in the course — or in some ways so awful. He got miserably depressed and took to drinking — that part’s true — when he was stationed way out in California in the late-1850s. He was a bit of a drunk in those years and he resigned from the army. He’d been a veteran of the Mexican War, decorated, but he quit the army, bored, depressed, and he went back to Illinois, his home — well born in Ohio but he went back to Illinois — and he was working, as the story goes, it’s not a legend, in his brother’s leather shop in Galena, Illinois when the Civil War broke out. And because he was a West Point graduate and the only one around, they named him Colonel, and he led the regiment that was formed from that area of northwest Illinois, and off to war went Ulysses Grant.
Ulysses Grant is a classic example — and I want to give you an illustration of this — a classic example of an American, or an American male, for whom most of the rest of life, business, profession — except for horseback riding, and he was a hell of a horseman — almost everything else in his life had been a failure or near failure or simply boring. He’d grown up on farms but he hated farming. He’s a classic example of how sometimes war, tragically or unfortunately, can make a person. Were it not for the American Civil War you’d have never heard of Ulysses S. Grant. This is Bill McFeely’s description; William McFeely who has written the finest biography of Grant I think still ever done, although there’ve been many since. And he’s describing Grant’s situation in Galena and how bored he was and depressed he was and so on. And then McFeely writes: “War, the ordinary man’s escape from the ordinary. It was a way out of a leather store, and for some men it is much more than that, it is the fulfillment that the world will yield in no other manner. For these men, war appears as a refutation of evil, whether it be the evil of Hitler’s threat to Marc Bloch’s France or the slaveholders’ threat to Thoreau’s America, or less exalted but no less real, the evil of personal hollowness. War, for a man like Ulysses Grant, was the only situation in which he could truly connect to his country and countrymen and be at one with them and himself. Grant did not like the vainglory of victory or the drama of high strategy or the blood of battle, and he did not think that all wars were worth fighting, yet some essential part of his being was brought into play only in war. He never celebrated this fact, but neither did he deny it. He knew it was true. Only in war, and possibly at the end of his life in writing about the war, in what would be the greatest memoir of this war, did he find the completeness of experience that when engaged in it so intensely moved him.”
Well, Grant was a soldier and, not unlike Robert E. Lee, he did enjoy the spirit of battle; I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. And he moved on these forts, first Fort Henry, February 6, with about 15,000 men on land and a bunch of slow, cumbersome gunboats. Fort Henry was not well defended and basically just surrendered. A week later on the other river, the Cumberland, Fort Donelson was shelled into submission by artillery. This was the second week of February 1862, and Grant famously demanded an unconditional surrender from General Simon Bolivar Buckner, who had been Grant’s roommate at West Point. There’s a wonderful exchange of their dispatches that you can read if you want to look it up, easy to find. Grant writes to Buckner and says, “Hello friend, you will surrender all of your forces and all of your guns or I will move on you immediately.” And Buckner writes back and says, “Well now, well now Ulysses, can we talk?” Grant writes back and says, “No.” [laughter] And of course the press will pick this up; U.S. Grant will become “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. The significance of Forts Donelson and Henry were not only symbolic, because the Northern press picked this up, waiting for war — God, months and months and months had gone by since Bull Run. There’d been various engagements. The armies were growing all over the country. Men were going off to war and writing letters home to their mothers, sweethearts and families. Here was some real war and some Union victory and a hero.
Most importantly, strategically though, the city of Nashville, capital of Tennessee, had to be abandoned by the Confederates; they could no longer defend it, and they did abandon it. It was partly a strategic retreat and partly out of the reality they didn’t have enough people to defend it. And a Confederate Army beginning to grow now — and this is into the spring of 1862 — as thousands more southern boys and men would leave those farms, in hundreds of regiments from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas in particular. They will come to join the Army of Albert Sidney Johnston who led the small Confederate Army out of Nashville, down southwestward into Southwest Tennessee, just across the border to the town of Corinth, Mississippi. And it was around Corinth, Mississippi, in the northeast tip corner of the State of Mississippi that a huge Confederate army was assembled.
Chapter 3. The Battle of Shiloh [00:20:07]
Now, Grant was now put in command of all Union forces, all over Tennessee. Grant, though, had no idea, really, what the Confederates were going to do, and what happened at the Battle of Shiloh was not only the first major horrible, bloody battle of the war, and it would shock the country, but it was a total surprise to the Union forces. Put simply, here’s what happened. Albert Sidney Johnston had about 40,000 troops at Corinth, Mississippi, and Grant had at his disposal about 60,000 troops. These are still not the size of the armies that will begin to unfold in the East in Virginia. But Grant had his army split in two, and widely apart. About one-third of it was under the command of a general named Don Carlos Buell, and he was in central Tennessee, Grant’s forces were sort of more western Tennessee, and both were slowly trying to move down toward southwestern Tennessee and maybe even into Mississippi to find this Confederate Army, in March and early April of ‘62.
What happened was that Albert Sidney Johnston attempted a surprise attack, and it was one of the most successful surprise attacks by these large unwieldy armies that ever happened in this war. He marched his men twenty miles, most of it in darkness, with all kinds of clothing and burlap used as muffling on the wheels of caissons and wagons; even men were told to put muffling on their boots. And they marched through night in the dark, April 5 to 6, 1862, north from Corinth, across the border into Tennessee, and they attacked a remnant, a sizeable remnant, of Grant’s forces that had just reached a place called Pittsburg Landing, or Shiloh Church as it’s known — it’s a tiny little village. And what happened on the first day at Shiloh was the bloodiest day of the war until that point in time.
Grant’s troops were literally caught with their pants down. They had no pickets out, they had no idea where the Confederate Army really was, nor especially that they were that close. There are many famous descriptions of this in soldiers’ letters and diaries, and afterward by Ambrose Bierce especially, of how this sneak attack had caught them literally around their tents in the morning making coffee, some of them without their pants on. The first day at Shiloh was a complete Confederate victory. It drove the Union forces right back to the river, the Tennessee River, and by the time Grant and one of his other generals, William Tecumseh Sherman, arrived that night they found remnants of this completely defeated Union force hiding on the banks of the Tennessee River, many of them having lost their regiments, lost their command, lost their officers, didn’t know where they were. Through the dark of night April 6 to 7, it was especially Sherman and other officers — as Don Carlos Buell’s 20,000 men arrived at Shiloh in the middle of that night — Sherman and other officers, literally at times, whipped Union soldiers into order, tried to help men find their units. And when dawn came the next day they counter-attacked across the same fields in savage hand-to-hand combat that all of these soldiers had never experienced and never seen. And by the end of it they completely reversed the first day’s action. The Battle of Shiloh took place in an area about a mile to a mile and a half in diameter, and by the end of the second day, as Grant famously put it in one of the very few moments in his two-volume memoir where he ever kind of really broke down and described the carnage, he said, “I could’ve walked across that field as far as the eye could see and never touched the ground by walking on the bodies.” For the two armies in forty-eight hours there were 23,841 casualties; 23,841 casualties.
Now, Shiloh strategically was a Union success in the simple fact that the Confederate Army had to retreat back into Mississippi, and did not succeed in re-entering Tennessee and opening up a new front in Tennessee, or taking control of the Tennessee River in that region. But it was truly a shock to the country when these casualty lists came back and were published in newspapers, and when the adjutants of regiments — which was the job of an adjutant in a regiment was to record the casualties and send them home. And it was, of course, that site where Grant remembered realizing for the first time — and I had that quote up here the other day and you can read it in Gienapp — where he said, “It was at that moment I realized that this war could never — that the Union could never be preserved without” what he called “complete conquest of the South.” That’s what Bruce Catton meant about how the scabbard was being thrown away. It was now a war where no one would ever call retreat.
Chapter 4. McClellan’s Abortive 1862 Naval Campaign and “Stonewall” Jackson [00:26:29]
Now, back east, back to the melodrama between McClellan and Lincoln. No, that’s not the one I want, excuse me. I think you can see enough of this, I hope. Now McClellan throughout that winter kept training, training, and training the Army of the Potomac. And he did train them in to what many military historians still say was one of the most efficient and certainly the best supplied armies the world had ever seen. He would have almost 100,000 troops — he’d have 90,000 in the field — 100,000 troops under his command. And he came up with a plan that Lincoln hated; Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, didn’t like it; officers around him didn’t particularly like it. But it was McClellan’s idea. McClellan did not want to invade Virginia from the north. He thought it would be a better idea to sail the entire Army of the Potomac down the Potomac River out into Chesapeake Bay and land on the peninsula between the York and the James Rivers in Virginia, and invade Virginia, toward Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Take the enemy’s capital, was his aim here — a strategy eventually that Ulysses S. Grant is going to tear to shreds, and quickly realize, as he was realizing out in the West, that the Confederacy was its armies — not its capital, not a city here, a town there.
The idea was to land this huge flotilla of an army on the coast and march it sixty, seventy miles inland and attack Richmond from the east. Now, part of the theory here was that the Confederacy had been fortifying the north side of Richmond but maybe not the east side. Now, it’s no surprise folks, if you float 90,000 people down the river and land them on the coast that you might be coming from the east. Lo and behold. But this is where — I don’t want to make McClellan into just comic relief like Burns does; I think he overdoes it — but here it is important to understand that generals did have impact on this war. It was not that McClellan had a personal distaste for battle necessarily; those charges that he was somehow a coward and all that, I don’t think that holds up at all. But he did not like huge general engagements, he did not want to sacrifice any more men than he had to. And remember, he doesn’t want the war to become remorseless.
He put the town of Yorktown, on the coast — the same Yorktown where Cornwallis had surrendered to George Washington in the American Revolution — he put Yorktown under siege when he landed, for an entire month, from April 5 to May 4, because McClellan was convinced that he was confronted with far more men than he really was. At one point McClellan actually wrote a dispatch to Secretary of War Stanton claiming that he was facing on the peninsula at least 200,000 Confederates. There weren’t 200,000 Confederates under arms anywhere in the South, in 1862. But McClellan was always overestimating his enemy. He hired the Pinkerton detectives. He hired this guy named Lowe with his balloons; this was the first use of balloons in warfare. They’d float these things up in the air and they’d go and they’d float over the enemy and they’d try to count the forces and they’d hope the wind was right to float them back and land them. They were pretty cumbersome, awful; and one time the thing floated and it crashed in the other side of the Confederate troops. He was getting his intelligence from all these new modern ways, and every time he got intelligence it’s apparent that McClellan would just start doing some multiplication. Oh, and there’s so many stories about this; I’ll spare you. He didn’t need to put Yorktown under siege for a month, he could’ve taken it in 48 hours. The Confederates had built a lot of fortifications, huge fortifications, but they didn’t have very many men behind it. And where one officer might see one Confederate in a field-glass, McClellan would see five or 10.
Given this caution, given this slowness, the Confederate command in Richmond sent the young General Stonewall Jackson with about 20,000 men over to the Shenandoah Valley, here. While McClellan had landed this massive army on the peninsula and it was slowly beginning to move, they send Stonewall Jackson with an army of about 20,000 men to the Shenandoah Valley, where Stonewall Jackson conducted one of the most famous military campaigns in history — and they still teach this in minute detail at West Point. Actually he only had about 17,000 men. The purpose of this was to throw fear into northern Virginia, fear into the capital at Washington, and to keep about 30,000 Union troops in Northern Virginia, that McClellan had left behind. The idea here was that McClellan would move from the east, 30,000, roughly, Union troops would move from the north, and they would crush Richmond from two sides, and the war would be over by July. The Confederates saw this and they said, all right. Jackson spent the period April 29 to June 5, five weeks roughly, marching all up and down the Shenandoah Valley, driving his men to utter exhaustion, twenty and twenty-five miles a day. He fought five major battles, marched 400 miles in those five weeks, fought lots of kind of contact, rearguard actions, eluded three different Union armies or parts of Union armies at various times, threw fear into Washington, kept the 30,000 Union troops all occupied in Northern Virginia and Western Virginia, and then escaped, back down the valley and back to Richmond, by the time McClellan attacked. It was an extraordinary campaign. It made Stonewall Jackson’s fame.
Chapter 5. The Battle of Seven Days and Robert E. Lee’s Move North [00:33:34]
Now, the first major contact finally between the Union forces and Confederate forces on the peninsula came at a place called Seven Pines or Fair Oaks. It’s a place about some six, seven miles east of Richmond. It would be the first major bloody affair for this Army of the Potomac. And I want to describe it for you by simply reading excerpts from a few letters, of a Union soldier, leading up to the moment of his first major battle. And I want to do this in part because we need to understand — and we’ll come back to this question a bit later — that what a common soldier out there in the field understands about what is happening is, of course, almost always a blur; it’s the fog of war that he sees. I had the opportunity about, oh God, fifteen years ago now, to edit a collection of Civil War letters that were lopped in my lap by a young soldier from Massachusetts named Charles Brewster. Charlie Brewster was a store clerk in Northampton, Massachusetts when the Civil War broke out in April of ‘61. He was 27-years-old, he felt like a total failure in life. He was not yet married. He had nothing going on. And he enlisted as fast as he could in the 10th Massachusetts, and he spent that whole fall and winter of ‘61/’62 in camp. And I will mention Charlie again next week, because Charlie was no abolitionist, trust me, but he comes to realize through this experience that the war has to destroy slavery. It’s an interesting model of the average Yankee. But he wrote incredible letters, always to his mother or his sister. He writes this on May — Battle of Fair Oaks or Seven Pines occurred on May 31 of 1862. He knows a big battle’s coming. They don’t know exactly where or when. It is raining like hell. He’s sleeping in the mud on what he calls a rubber blanket. He gets diarrhea that nearly is killing him, and he will almost die of diarrhea twice in this war. But he keeps writing to his mother. And one morning the rain has stopped and he tells her what a beautiful morning it is. “Mother, I wish you could see what a splendid morning this is. The trees are in full foliage and the birds are singing in the trees and the water ripples and sparks at my feet, with the sun shining gloriously over all. And if it were not for the regiment I see before me, each with his deadly end-field rifle on his shoulder, I could hardly imagine that there was a war anywhere in the land.”
Now, day by day — he writes every day to his mother, long letters. Some of these letters handwritten were fifteen to twenty page letters, and he wrote about 240 of them, in the course of the war. May 22, in a clover field, he says: “Dear Mother, it is just sunset, a most beautiful day, though it has been dreadful hot. I was relieved this morning from my guard duty, at General Keyes’ headquarters, and joined the regiment and immediately took up my line of march with them. We came on about two miles, or perhaps not quite as far as that, and bivouacked in this field. It’s the best place we have had since we left Warwick. Our small brigade is in the advance and we go out on picket frequently. We do not know anything of what is going on in the world outside of our camp. How I wish I could see a late paper. We’ve got a rumor that there’s been a battle out in Corinth, Mississippi, and that Beauregard and 23,000 men are prisoners, but I presume there is no truth in it. Our artillery had a skirmish last night, in a swamp in the front. We’re expecting a great battle Mom, but I reckon that Little Mac will make his dispositions for it and the chivalry” — which means the South — “will take a distant view of his preparations and then skedaddle, as usual. If they don’t they will get a terrible licking, though it is reported that they are concentrating everything there and have got 140,000 troops. A contraband” — meaning an escaped slave — “that came in yesterday says that they are talking terrible fierce about burning Richmond, fighting over the ashes. But I think that’s all bosh.”
Thursday morning, May 23: “On picket,” he says. “Dear Mother, Captain and myself slept under the same blanket last night and on the ground in front of the muskets, and it was harder than Pharaoh’s heart. But it promotes early rising, for it’s now 7 a.m. and I’ve been up for three hours.”
“In an oat field, Saturday, May 24. I had the best view of the army in motion there that I ever had as they came down a long slope of low hills to the creek and then up the other side, and as we arrived at the top of the latter slope I turned and took a look back and could see the long line, looking like an enormous snake winding back for two and three miles, and bristling with bayonets, and at a short distance the Stars and Stripes and the flags of different states and the guidons, presenting a scene that occurs but once in a great while. It is raining like great guns again and the order has come to pack up and move on.”
“Oh dear Mother,” — this is the next day — “A large mail has come and everybody has got something but me. I cannot write any more under such circumstances. So goodbye, my love to all. [Laughter] And if you can, any of you, spare time, please write me a letter. [Laughter] Love, Charlie.”
Wednesday, May 28th. “Dear Mother, Today the sun shines brightly and it is brazen hot. But at half past two this company has got to go out and dig in the trenches for two hours. One thing is very certain, if they do not take Richmond soon they will kill the whole army by this ceaseless exposure and toil.”
May 31st, the day of the Battle of Seven Pines. “Mother, and now in relation to the coming battle, if anything should happen and I should get killed, you will be entitled to my pay. There is three months due me, but if I should not get paid off before anything should happen, my pay will be in two places; that is from the March” — meaning the month — “there will be fifty dollars per month in the State Treasury of Massachusetts, which I have allotted there subject to my own order. The rest of my pay is drawn from the U.S. Paymaster, as usual.” Imagine being his mother.
And then it’s this letter after the battle. “June 2, 1862, six miles from Richmond. Dear Mother, I presume this letter will find you most anxious, expecting a letter from me. I’m sitting in the hot sun and can write you but a few lines. Oh Mother, I cannot begin to give you any idea of the terrific storm of bullets, shot and shell, that poured over us as we lay behind those pits. We could not get into them for they were full of brine of water, but we lay right behind them in the mud. After half an hour of this the firing ceased and we were ordered forward behind some fallen woods.” And then he goes on to describe how they were attacked from the rear and how he heard the bullets flying by him constantly, and how he considers it a miracle that he is alive. And then at the very end of this letter: “I cannot succeed in giving you any idea of battle. But I know this much, that I had no possible hope of coming out alive. And I thought it all over, how terribly you would feel, and all that. But I came out without a scratch. I look back upon it and I cannot think how it can be. It does not seem as though any man that had been there could come out unhurt.” Then he begins to describe his friends and buddies who were killed, by name, how they were killed, where they were shot. And he ends, “There are so many incidents crowding my head Mother, that I cannot write clearly at all. And even when I sleep, the minute I get into a doze, I hear the whistling of the shells and the shouts and the groans. And to sum it up in two words, it is horrible.”
Charlie will survive the war. He nearly died of dysentery twice. He had two horses shot out from under him. He was deeply proud of his commission as a Second Lieutenant and as an adjutant of his regiment. His regiment was devastated. There were so few men left by July of 1864, they were disbanded. He went home to Massachusetts. He couldn’t imagine being a civilian. He hated civilians. He re-enlisted to be a recruiter of black soldiers. This racist young man from western Massachusetts, who will freely use the word “nigger,” was employed from August of 1864 through the end of the war recruiting black men in Norfolk, Virginia, and his principle job was sitting in an office writing love letters for illiterate black women, to their husbands at the front, whom he thanks for teaching him the art of love-letter writing.
Well, the battle of the peninsula ended up in what’s called the Seven Days. The Battle of the Seven Days were the battles fought all around Richmond, from June 25th through July 1st, seven consecutive days; places called Mechanicsville, Gaines Mill, Savage Station, Frazier’s Farm, Malvern Hill. They’re all little crossroads — they’re not even really villages anymore — that are just east of Richmond. It was sustained, day-to-day fighting. Both sides suffered horrible casualties. The result was essentially the fact that McClellan did not succeed in taking Richmond; in fact, on the contrary, McClellan’s forces were forced down south of Richmond to the edge of the James River to a place called Malvern Hill where McClellan put his wounded, damaged army into camp for too long. The Battle of the Seven Days saved Richmond, it saved the Confederacy. It also brought Robert E. Lee into the command of all Confederate forces in the eastern theater of the war, because Joseph E. Johnston, who had been in command of the Confederate forces, was wounded on the first day of the Seven Days, and Jefferson Davis put Lee in command. And it was in some ways Lee’s aggressiveness in the Seven Days that actually won that affair.
And now Lee made the first fateful decision of the war, for him. After many consultations with Jefferson Davis and his other commanders, he made the decision to invade the North. And this was fateful, to say the least, and it will bring us to the first major turning point of the Civil War. I’ve just run the clock out, I fear. Oh damn. I have two minutes. Let me leave you here. The idea Lee had, and it’s not that complicated, is that the war was now devastating Virginia. Richmond was all but under siege. The theory here was take the war to the North, take the war out of Virginia, take the war to northern soil, hopefully get into Maryland. And he believed there were thousands of Maryland men who would come to the Confederate standard, if they saw the Confederate Army. Threaten the capital, Washington, DC; threaten Philadelphia and Pennsylvania; threaten the North, take the war to their soil, to their farms, to their homes. And strategically — and this is where Jefferson Davis agreed with him, although he was very leery about this — a strike into the North that could win a major victory on northern soil and threaten the Union capital, possibly even enforce an evacuation of the Federal capital, might bring the most important thing the Confederacy needed — and they were on the verge of it — and that was British intervention, British recognition and intervention on the side of the Confederacy. I’ll discuss that possible intervention more as a piece of how emancipation becomes the result of this Antietam campaign next week.
Chapter 6. Conclusion [00:49:14]
But let me leave you here. Lee decides in the face of a kind of quiescent McClellan to leave only a small force in Richmond, and move north into Virginia and invade the north. McClellan’s army, having suffered 20,000 casualties in the Seven Days, is not going to move, and he’s not going to move until he absolutely has to. It is the first great daring move of the war. It will fail, but it nearly succeeded. And the reason Antietam is the first major turning point of this war is not just because of the decisive battle they fought on the Maryland side of the Potomac, but because it will be the occasion to allow Abraham Lincoln to do what he’d been planning to do through much of that summer, and Congress had been prodding him to do, which was to announce to the world that this was a war to free the slaves. See you next week.
Sunday, 15 January 2023
That is, they did things for her to help her to do things for them which they didn’t want done.
“Boy, boy, these wild courses of yours will break your mother’s heart.”
That eminently Victorian appeal may often have been True. Affection was bitterly wounded when one member of the family fell from the homely ethos into something worse — gambling, drink, keeping an opera girl.
Unfortunately it is almost equally possible to break your mother’s heart by rising above the homely ethos. The conservative tenacity of Affection works both ways. It can be a domestic counterpart to that nationally suicidal type of education which keeps back the promising child because the idlers and dunces might be “hurt” if it were undemocratically moved into a higher class than themselves.
All these perversions of Affection are mainly connected with Affection as a Need-love.
But Affection as a Gift-love has its perversions "too.
I am thinking of Mrs. Fidget, who died a few months ago. It is really astonishing how her family have brightened up.
The drawn look has gone from her husband’s face; he begins to be able to laugh.
The Younger Boy, whom I had always thought an embittered, peevish little creature, turns out to be quite Human.
The Elder, who was hardly ever at home except when he was in bed, is nearly always there now and has begun to reorganise The Garden.
The Girl, who was always supposed to be “delicate” (though I never found out what exactly the trouble was), now has the riding lessons which were once out of the question, dances all night, and plays any amount of tennis.
Even the dog who was never allowed out except on a lead is now a well-known member of the Lamp-post Club in their road.
Mrs. Fidget very often said that she lived for her family.
And it was not untrue. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew it.
“She lives for her family,” they said; “what a wife and mother!”
She did all the washing; true, she did it badly, and they could have afforded to send it out to a laundry, and they frequently begged her not to do it. But she did.
There was always a hot lunch for anyone who was at home and always a hot meal at night (even in midsummer).
They implored her not to provide this. They protested almost with tears in their eyes (and with truth) that they liked cold meals.
It made no difference.
She was living for her family.
She always sat up to “welcome” you home if you were out late at night; two or three in the morning, it made no odds; you would always find the frail, pale, weary face awaiting you, like a silent accusation.
Which meant of course that you couldn’t with any decency go out very often.
She was always making things too; being in her own estimation (I’m no judge myself) an excellent amateur dressmaker and a great knitter.
And of course, unless you were a heartless brute, you had to wear the things.
(The Vicar tells me that, since her death, the contributions of that family alone to “sales of work” outweigh those of all his other parishioners put together.)
And then her care for their health! She bore the whole burden of that daughter’s “delicacy” alone. The Doctor — an old friend, and it was not being done on National Health — was never allowed to discuss matters with his patient. After the briefest examination of her, he was taken into another room by the mother.
The girl was to have no worries, no responsibility for her own health. Only loving care; caresses, special foods, horrible tonic wines, and breakfast in bed.
For Mrs. Fidget, as she so often said, would “work her fingers to the bone” for her family.
They couldn’t stop her.
Nor could they — being decent people — quite sit still and watch her do it. They had to help.
Indeed they were always having to help.
That is, they did things for her to help her to do things for them which they didn’t want done.
As for the dear dog, it was to her, she said, “Just like one of the children.” It was in fact, as like one of them as she could make it. But since it had no scruples it got on rather better than they, and though vetted, dieted and guarded within an inch of its life, contrived sometimes to reach the dustbin or the dog next door.
The Vicar says Mrs. Fidget is now at rest. Let us hope she is. What’s quite certain is that her family are.
Saturday, 14 January 2023
DIONYSIAN EXCESSES
As well as a banqueting cup, they could be used in pagan rituals as a
CHAPTER III
DIONYSIAN EXCESSES
IN A characteristic passage in the Bacchae, Euripedes, "the Rationalist," speaks of Demeter and Dionysus as the greatest of the gods. He puts into the mouth of the aged prophet Teiresias this preachment for the instruction of the honest but irreconcilable Pentheus:
Two chiefest powers,
Prince, among men there are: Divine Demeter--
Earth is she, name her by which name you will.
She upon dry food nurtures mortal men;
Then follows Semele's son, to match her gift
The cluster's flowing draught he found and gave
To mortals, which gives rest from grief to men,
So that through him do men obtain good things.
This juxtaposition of Demeter and Dionysus is not at all surprising; for among the friendly rivals of the Eleusinian mysteries in Greece the most vigorous, the most distinctive, and the most widespread was the worship of Dionysus. Three centuries before Alexander made his conquest of the Orient, Dionysus had made his conquest of Greece. Coming as an immigrant from Thrace, attended by a wild crew of satyrs and maenads, he took Greece by storm, and sometime between Homer and Phidias, he won a place for himself on Olympus and the patronage of the most dignified city-states in Greece. The type of religious experience exemplified by his cult is of exceptional interest to the student of personal religion. In order to understand the Dionysian experience, however, it is necessary to know who Dionysus himself was.
I
Notwithstanding his elevation to Olympus, Dionysus was anything but an aristocratic sky-god. He was rather an earth-deity, a god of the peasantry. Though his father was Zeus, the sky- and rain-god, his mother was of the earth earthy. Dionysian mythology named her Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and this name betrays her real significance as a personification of the earth (cf. Nova Zembla, "new earth"). In the Hope collection there is a vase painting representing the youthful Dionysus rising out of an earth mound--the vase-painter thus emphasizing the earth-born nature of the god.
But Semele, the god's earth-mother, was not only the fertile earth of springtime absorbing the warm showers of the sky and naturally productive; in local legend at Thebes see was represented as the thunder-smitten earth also. For Hera in her jealousy had craftily persuaded Semele to ask her lover to prove his deity by appearing in all his power and glory as god of heaven. Zeus acceded to her request appearing to her armed with all his terrors, destroyed her with his lightnings. Even as the mother was dying, however, Zeus rescued their unborn child from her tortured body.
In birth-bowers new did Zeus Cronion
Receive his scion;
For hid in a cleft of his thigh,
By the gold clasps knit, did he lie
Safe hidden from Hera's eye
Till the Fates' day came.
Lucian, in his usual satirical vein, made the most of his opportunity to parody this mythological theme. Thus, in popular legend the earth-born Dionysus, the son of Semele, was himself represented as a twice-born deity. He was dithyrambus, which for the Greeks meant "he who entered life by a double door." In this peculiarly artificial sense he was Dionysus, the son of Zeus, as his name suggests.
Quite naturally this son of earth and sky functioned as the personification of vegetable life. As such he was a yearly divinity, who came and went with the seasons. His experience in relation to men was characterized by recurrent theophanies and recessions as the life of nature died and revived year after year. Plutarch noted among various peoples this characteristic conception of Dionysus:
"The Phrygians think that the god is asleep in the winter and is awake in summer, and at one season they celebrate with Bacchic rites his goings to bed and at the other his risings up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in the winter he is bound down and imprisoned and in the spring he is stirred up and let loose."
In the popular phrases of his worship, Dionysus was apprehended in very concrete terms. He was, on the one side, the god of vegetation in general and the wine-god in particular. Thus he made his chief impression on the Greeks. It may be, as Miss Harrison has suggested, that in his native Thracian home he functioned as a beer-god, Sabazius or Bromius, the god of a cereal intoxicant; but certainly he came to Greece and won his signal triumph there as the wine-god. Even as the olive was constantly associated with Athena, so the vine was characteristically associated with Dionysus. Other familiar symbols of Dionysus were the grape cluster and a two-handled drinking cup. By these accessories the god may easily be identified in Greek vase paintings and on cult monuments. The various cult appellatives emphasizing this aspect of Dionysus are far too numerous to be listed. Greek literature, too, rang with the praises of the god who "made grow for men the clustered vine," but the fact is so familiar that it does not demand special citation.
What is particularly noteworthy is this, that the relation of the god to the drink was not merely that of creator to the thing created. Many times the relationship expressed was that of identification even. The god was in the wine; he was the wine, even. He was not merely the god of libation. To quote Euripides statement, he was the libation, "The god who himself is offered in libation to the other gods." In this passage the identification of the god with the wine is as absolute as the identification of Christ in Catholic thought with the consecrated wine of the mass, or, to cite an illustration from the far away religious system of the Vedas, the identification of the god Soma with the soma drink. It is not surprising, therefore, to find in Attica the festival of the theoinia or the "god wine," celebrated by those families who were believed to be the direct descendents of Dionysus' original followers, in whose vineyards grew vines which were offshoots from the vine spray that the god himself had given them. Under such circumstances the devotees of Dionysus would be sure of the presence of the very god himself in the consecrated wine made from the sacred grapes. That this realistic identification of the deity and the fruit of the vine was not merely a primitive conception is proved by the existence at Philippi in Paul's time of a religious brotherhood dedicated to Dionysus Botreus ("Dionysus the Vine Cluster").
Dionysus was the god of animal life as well as of vegetable life. As such he was variously represented in different animal forms. It was inevitable that these animal embodiments should be varied in different localities. In a goat-raising country the normal representation of the power of life and generation would be the goat. Similarly, in a cattle-raising country the embodiment of the divine power in the form of a bull was to be expected. And so we have various animal theophanies of Dionysus recorded in Greek literature. Euripides chorus of Bacchanals, for example, thus variously invoke their god in their moment of supreme anxiety:
Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name
O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads,
Lion of the Burning Flame!
O God, Beast, Mystery, come!
Of the less frequent animal forms under which Dionysus was revered, that of the goat should especially be noted. What makes this conception of Dionysus peculiarly important is the fact that as a goat-god he was involved in the obscure beginnings of Attic tragedy, and thereafter he remained the patron deity of this highly artistic literary form (trag-odia, goat-song). Another less familiar animal embodiment of Dionysus was that of a kid. There was a common legend that Zeus, in order to save his son from the jealous wrath of Hera, transformed him into a kid. A mystic expression nebrizein, "to play the fawn," was common in the Dionysus cult. While it is an expression of doubtful import, yet it is clearly reminiscent of another primitive conception of Dionysus as a fawn.
By far the most generally accepted and most significant of the animal embodiments of the god, however, was that of a bull. There were a multitude of cult appellatives emphasizing this conception of Dionysus. He was variously addressed as the "horned child," the "horned deity," the "bull-horned," and the "bull-browed." The Argives worshiped him as "the son of a cow" or "bull-born," and the ancient Elean chant addressed him directly as a bull. "Come, hero Dionysus, come with the Graces to thy house by the shores of the sea; hasten with thy bull-foot." So ran the hymn itself, while the chorus repeated "goodly bull, goodly bull." One readily recalls, also, that the residence of the king-archon at Athens, where the sacred marriage between Dionysus and the basilinna was celebrated, was called the boukolion, or "ox stall."
With all this background of realistic thought, it is strange that we do not have a representation of the bull-Dionysus in Greek vase paintings. Plutarch, however, states that the Greeks not infrequently imaged the god in bull form in sculpture, and in classical literature this representation of the god was a stock one. Thus the Bacchae of Euripides is permeated with the conception of Dionysus as a bull-god. Of Dionysus' second birth it is said:
Then a God bull-horned Zeus bare, And with serpents entwined his hair.
When Pentheus attempted to imprison Dionysus, "a bull beside the stalls he found." And finally when the god led the king in a hypnotized state out to his doom, Pentheus seemed to see a bull going before him. In his hallucination the king exclaimed:
A bull you seem that leads on before;
And horns have sprouted upon your head.
How, were you a brute?--Truly you are a bull now!
These passages reflect perfectly the realism of primitive thought about the god. Far more than being represented by the bull, Dionysus was thought of as being actually embodied in the bull, so that the animal, like the wine, was the god.
II
With these primitive conceptions of Dionysus in mind, it is possible for the modern student, even, to appreciate something of the vivid, central experience of the god's devotees. Wine played a prominent part in Dionysian worship. Bacchic literature reeks with wine and rings with the joys of intoxication. The chorus in Euripides' Bacchae sings:
The cluster's flowing draught....
....gives rest from grief to men
Woe-worn, soon as the vine's stream fills them
And sleep, the oblivion of our daily ills,--
There is none other balm for toils.
This Bacchic joy puts an end to woe.
When blent with the flute light laughters awaken,
And the children of care have forgotten to weep
Whensoever is revealed the cluster's splendour
In the banquet that men to the high Gods tender
And o'er ivy-wreathed revellers drinking deep
The wine bowl drops the mantle of sleep.
The truth is that sheer physical intoxication from the drinking of wine was the essence of Dionysian religion. In the service of their god the Bacchanals drank wine until they were intoxicated. There was indeed point to Plato's criticism that an immortality of drunkenness seemed to be considered the Dionysian reward of virtue. For the Bacchanals themselves, however, the experience was something more and higher than drunkenness. It was spiritual ecstasy, not mere physical intoxication. The wine they drank was for them potent with divine power--it was the god himself, and the very quintessence of divine life was resident in the juice of the grape. This the devotees of Bacchus knew as a matter of personal experience when, after drinking the wine, they felt a strange new life within themselves. That was the life and power of their god. Their enthusiasm was quite literally a matter of having the god within themselves, of being full of and completely possessed by the god. So they themselves described it in their own language (entheos, enthusiasm). They might be intoxicated; but they felt themselves possessed by the god. The drinking of wine in the service of Dionysus was for them a religious sacrament. Even Plato, who had few kind words to say for intoxication, made one exception to his usual rule that it was unfitting for a man to drink to the point of drunkenness. That one exception was "on the occasions of festivals of the god of wine." At such times drunkenness was a matter of communion with the god. So Euripides could say that he who knows the Dionysian mysteries "is pure in life, and revelling on the mountains, has the Bacchic communion in his soul."
The devotees of Dionysus had other realistic means of attaining to communion with their god. They had a sacrament of eating as well as a sacrament of drinking. This rite was the "feast of raw flesh." To be an initiate into the mysteries of Dionysus one must be able to avow
I have .... Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts.
The victim varied. Sometimes it was a goat, as was probably the custom in Thrace. The Bacchanals of Euripides follow this practice and know
The joy of the red quick fountain
The blood of the hill-goat torn.
They
Quaff the goat's delicious blood,
A strange, a rich, a savage food.
Sometimes the victim was a fawn, and the sacred fawn-skins with which the maenads were clothed were the skins torn from these luckless animals. One of the familiar depictions of the maenads on Greek vases was to show them carrying a fawn in their arms or tearing it to pieces in frenzy. More frequently, however, the Dionysian victim was a bull. This was particularly the case in Crete where, to quote Firmicus Maternus, "the Cretans rend a living bull with their teeth, and they simulate madness of soul as they shriek through the secret places of the forest with discordant clamors."
This quotation well suggests the orgiastic character of the feast of raw flesh. The denvotees tore asunder the slain beast and devoured the dripping flesh in order to assimilate the life of the god resident in it. Raw flesh was living flesh, and haste had to be made lest the divine life within the aniinal should escape. So the feast became a wild, barbaric, frenzied affair. In the Bacchae one of the herdsmen describes to Pentheus an attack of the maenads upon the royal herd. Doubtless the description gives an adequate impression of one of the Bacchic feasts.
Down swooped they then
Upon our pasturing kine with swordless hand,
Then had you seen your mother with her hands
Rend a deep uddered heifer bellowing loud:
And others tore the calves in crimson shreds.
Ribs had you seen and cloven hoofs far hurled
This way and that, and flakes of flesh that hung
And dripped all blood bedabbled, 'neath the pines.
Bulls chafing, lowering fiercely along the horn
Erewhile, were tripped and hurled upon the earth
Dragged down by countless clutching maiden hands
More swiftly was the flesh that lapped their bones
Stripped, than you could have closed your kingly eyes.
This orgiastic rite furnished the Fathers of the early church with just the material for which they were looking to use in discrediting paganism. With genuine satisfaction they described the barbarous ceremonial in all its revolting detail. Clement of Alexandria said:
"I will not dance out your mysteries as they say Alcibiades did, but I will strip them naked, and bring them out on the open stage of life, in view of those who are spectators at the drama of truth. The Bacchi hold orgies in honor of a mad Dionysus. They celebrate a divine madness by the eating of raw flesh. The final accomplishment of their rite is the distribution of the flesh of butchered victims. They are crowned with snakes, and shriek out the name of Eva, that Eve through whom sin came into the world, and the symbol of their Bacchae orgies is the consecrated serpent."
In a similar vein, Arnobius wrote of the "feasts of raw flesh in which with feigned frenzy and loss of a sane mind you twine snakes about you, and to show yourselves full of the divinity and majesty of the god, you demolish with gory mouths the entrails of goats bleating for mercy."
The fact should not be blinked that in its primitive this rite probably involved the sacrifice of a human victim. Porphyry knew a tradition that in Chios a man was torn to pieces in the worship of Dionysus Omadius, the "Raw One." At Potniae, according to Pausanias, a priest of Dionysus was once slain by the inhabitants and a plague was sent upon them in punishment. They sought relief, and the Delphian oracle told them that a beautiful boy must be sacrificed to the deity. Immediately afterward, Dionysus let it be known that he would accept a goat as a substitute. This story records the ancient transition in cult practice from the cannibal to the animal feast. Also in the fearful fate that met Pentheus at the hands of his own mother, as recorded by Euripides, there is a late literary echo of the primitive cannibalistic ritual.
To focus attention on these savage features, however, is to miss entirely the significance of the crude ceremonial. The real meaning of the orgy was that it enabled the devotee to partake of a divine substance and so to enter into direct and realistic communion with his god. The warm blood of the slain goat was "sacred blood," according to Lactantius Placidus. The god Dionysus was believed to be resident temporarily in the animal victim. One of the most remarkable illustrations of this ritual incarnation of the god was described by Aelian. Of the people of Tenedos, he said: "In ancient days they used to keep a cow with calf, the best they had, for Dionysus, and when she calved, they tended her like a woman in childbirth. But they sacrificed the newborn calf, having put cothurni on its feet." The use of the tragic buskins symbolized the conviction that the god was temporarily incarnate in the calf--pious opinion did not doubt that. Primitive logic easily persuaded men that the easiest way to charge oneself with divine power was to eat the quivering flesh and drink the warm blood of the sacred animal. Some went farther and sought to assimilate themselves to deity by wearing the skin of the animal. The central meaning of the celebration was that it enabled the devotee to enter into direct and realistic communion with his god.
Another means of inducing the divine possession, and the usual concomitant of the sacraments of eating and drinking just described, was the vertigo of the sacred dance. In preparation for the Bacchic revel, the devotees of the god properly equipped themselves with the gear of Dionysus. Like him they carried the thyrsus, a wand tipped with a pine cone and usually entwined with ivy. In their hair serpents were twisted and over their shoulders was thrown the sacred fawn-skin. Sometimes they wore horns on their foreheads. In clothing and equipment they were as like their god as possible.
The dances in honor of Dionysus were usually held at night time by torchlight and were preceded by fasting. They were accompanied by the weird music of wind instruments and the clashing of tambourines. Mingled with this strange music were the shouts of the Bacchanals themselves as they waved their torches in the darkness, thus giving to the scene an unearthly light. The dances were wild and irregular and were characterized by a tossing of the head and a violent, whirling bodily motion. Thus, by the very movements of the dance a physical frenzy was quickly induced, quite as the "dancing dervishes" of Mohammedanism lose control of themselves in the delirium of their ritual. It was for this ecstatic experience that the Bacchae of Euripides were yearning when they sang together:
Ah, shall my white feet in the dances gleam
The livelong night again? Ah, shall I there
Float through the Bacchanal's ecstatic dream,
Tossing my neck in the dewy air?
Significant of the maddening experience of the sacred dance were the names applied to the female followers of Dionysus. They were the maenads or "mad ones," and the thyiads or "rushing distraught ones." These epithets were but different ways of describing the female devotees who were under the influence of and possessed by their god. A more frequent designation was the more intimate one which called the devotees after the name of the god himself. The women who shared in the frenzied rites of Bacchus were themselves called Bacchae even as the men were Bacchi. Each one, without distinction of sex, by the very experience of divine possession became a personification of the god. Their delirium, induced by purely physical means, was for them a spiritual experience, and eventuated in the conviction, deep and strong, that they had their god within themselves. Plutarch connected the Dionysian frenzy with the Bacchic custom of chewing ivy leaves during this ceremonial, and affirmed that thus "the violent spirits which caused their enthusiasm entered into them.", Dionysus was god of the ivy quite as much as god of the vine. By the realistic ritual act of chewing ivy, then, the maenads of Dionysus incorporated his spirit within themselves. Herodotus, in speaking of the initiation of the Scythian king, Scyles, cited a particular and notable instance of Dionysian possession. The historian said of the king that "the god took possession" of him so that "he was maddened by the god and played the part of Bacchus." Thus, in the frenzy of the ritualistic revel, as in the orgy of eating raw flesh and drinking wine, the Bacchanals experienced communion with their god.
Apparently, in later times, at least, a sharp distinction was drawn between those who merely indulged in the physical excitement of the Bacchic revel and those who really shared in the spiritual experiences of the cult. At least we are acquainted with a familiar proverb, quoted by Plato, to the effect that "many are the bearers of the thyrsus, but the Bacchanals are few." Unless the initiate himself was conscious of contact with the divine de did not shared in the genuine Bacchic experience.
III
This predominantly emotional experience, whether induced by the dizziness of dancing or the crude sacraments of wine and raw flesh, marked for the Bacchanal the beginning of a new life. In a very real sense it was a new birth for the individual who experienced it. Hitherto he had been a man merely. Now he was something more; he was man plus god, a divinized human. Certain aspects of his new divine life deserve to be noted in order to emphasize the contrast with life as it was lived at the ordinary levels of human experience.
In its temporary emotional aspect it was characterized by excessive indulgence as contrasted with the reasoned moderation that was typical of Greek life generally. For Greek self-control was one of the four cardinal virtues and "nothing in excess" was a fundamental Hellenic principle of life. The Bacchic experience, however, cut sheer across this principle. In the Bacchae, Euripides said of Dionysus, "By halves he cares not to be magnified." And Plato admitted that "madness sent by god is better the moderation of men." Such was clearly the conviction of the followers of Dionysus.
Bacchic experience also caused a break with the customs and conventions of ordinary life and a return to the freedom of nature. The devotees of Dionysus deserted their homes temporarily, wandered free on the mountains, and indulged in certain wild, primitive, half-animal passions. Euripides gave a picture of the matrons of Thebes leaving their homes, their work, their babies even, to wander and revel in the mountains. They dressed themselves in fawnskins and wound snakes around their bodies.
Some cradling fawns or wolf cubs in their arms
Gave to the wild things of their own white milk
Young mothers they, who had left their babies.
With this return to the life of nature there was mingled a recrudescence of certain very primitive impulses. There was a lust for hot blood and a certain ferocious cruelty in the tearing to pieces of hapless victims.
The Bacchic revel also caused the joy and abandon of self-forgetfulness. The Bacchanals were no longer themselves, and this very fact brought a sense of freedom from former limitations and restraints. To what ridiculous extremes this self-abandon might be carried Euripides gave illustration when he represented aged Cadmus and blind Teiresias clad in fawnskins and gamboling off to join the. Bacchic revel. The ancient founder of Thebes gleefully affirms:
I shall not weary, nor by night nor day
Smiting on earth the Thyrsus. We forget
In joy our age.
Again, in a beautiful strophe by the chorus, Euripides glimpsed in more serious and appreciative fashion the sense of freedom which characterized the Bacchanal's experience. The simile he used was appropriately that of the faun escaping nets and huntsmen:
Till sheltering arms of trees around her close
The twilight of the tresses of the woods;-
O happy ransomed one, safe hid from foes
Where no man tracks the forest solitudes!
Altogether, therefore, the new Bacchic life was one of joyful self-abandon, of freedom from the complexities and restraints of civilization, of return to the direct simplicities of nature.
More than all this it was a life of miraculous power; for by the very fact of divine possession the Bacchanal believed himself to have acquired the power of the god. Hence, he could heal diseases, control the forces of nature, and even prophesy. Plato reflected the popular conviction that the Bacchae could work miracles in his famous comparison of the lyric poets to the maenads. He said:
Lyric poets are not in their right minds when they are composing their beautiful strains; but when failing under the power of music and meter they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind.
The Bacchae of Euripides literally teems with miracles. There
flows with milk the plain,
and flows with wine,
Flows with the wild bees' nectar dews divine.
The credulous herdsman of Pentheus tells of particular wonders wrought by the maenads:
One grasped her thyrsus staff, and smote the rock,
And forth upleapt a fountain's showry spray:
One in earth's bosom planted her reed-wand,
And up there through the god a wine-fount sent:
And whoso fain would drink white-foaming draughts
Scarred with their finger tips the breast of earth,
And milk gushed forth unstinted: dripped the while
Sweet streams of honey from their ivy staves.
In the battle between the Theban folk and the Bacchae, later narrated, this strange portent occurred: the javelins of the townspeople drew no blood while the wands of the maenads caused wound after wound. The same drama of Euripides also tells of the prophetic power of one who was possessed by Dionysus. Again it is Teiresias, himself a professional prophet, who thus testifies of Bacchus:
A prophet is this god, the Bacchic frenzy
And ecstasy are full fraught with prophecy:
For, in his fullness when he floods our frame
He makes his maddened votaries tell the future.
The life of the Bacchant was, therefore, a dynamic life in which the peculiar power of the deity operated to perform wonderful deeds through men.
Most important of all, the new Bacchic life in its emotional and dynamic aspects was viewed as but the foretaste of a happy existence in the future. The Thracians, among whom the Dionysian cult originated, seem to have early attained the belief in a blessed future life with the gods. In speaking of the Getae, a tribe of the Thracians, Herodotus affirmed, "They were the most valiant and most just of the Thracians," and then he added in explanation of these characteristics that "they believe themselves immortal; they think that they do not die, but that the dead go to join their god Zalmoxis." Pomponious Mela, a Latin geographer of the early imperial period, repeated a similar testimony concerning the Getae, only more in detail. There is considerable probability that this Zalmoxis was an indigenous Getan divinity, and was related to Sabazius, the Thracian prototype of the Greek Dionysus. Whatever may have been the relationship, it is clear that Dionysus functioned in Hellenistic cults as god of the underworld, and his devotees had the same expectation in relation to him that the ancient Getae had concerning Zalmoxis.
Being a yearly divinity Dionysus was a natural candidate for this function. His experience in nature was characterized by a constant dying and rising again. Yet it was only by proxy that Dionysus passed through these experiences; just as he was immolated by proxy in the rending of the sacred victim. The real Dionysus was the permanent spirit back of the phenomena of nature which caused the recurrent revival of life. He was a god, and immortality was one of the distinguishing characteristics of godhead. Immortality and divinity were all but interchangeable terms in primitive Greek thought.
Thus when the Bacchanals by the sacraments of eating and drinking entered into direct communion with their god, they became partakers of his immortality. In assimulating the raw flesh wherein the god was temporarily incarnate and in drinking the juice of the grape, they received into their bodies an undying substance. In life mystically united with their god, in death they could not be divided, and when the time came for them to go to the invisible world, they were sure of sharing the blessed life of their god. So the unusual emotional experiences fostered by the Dionysian rites, the intoxication of wine or of the dance, the frenzy of the orgy, the divine gift of foresight or miracle-working power--these were more than merely proofs of divine possession. They were a definite foretaste and assurance of a blessed future life. In the crude physical emotionalism of Bacchic ecstasy, therefore, the devotees of the wine-god found a new birth experience which guaranteed them a happy immortality.
IV
The question of the influence of the Dionysus type of experience in the Graeco-Roman world remains to be discussed. As early as the seventh century before the Christian era the state religions of the serene and placid Olympians were failing to satisfy the religious needs of great masses of the common people in Greece. In their dissatisfaction they turned to the more intimate gods of the earth who had to do with the common things of life: to Demeter, the goddess of grain, and to Dionysus, the god of the vine. These were divinities who suffered with men in their toil and who gave them joy at harvest time. The cult of Dionysus coming from the northland spread in a great wave of religious enthusiasm over Greece proper, over the island states of the Aegean, and across to the mainland of Asia Minor. At first it met with violent opposition, as the legends of Lycurgus and Pentheus prove. In those early days rarely was the god graciously received as he was, for example, by Icarus in Attica. In spite of opposition, however, the contagious enthusiasm of the wine-god spread with unusual rapidity throughout Greece. In order to restrain Bacchic excesses the city-states of Greece had no other alternative than to adopt the Cult, bring it under state patronage, and by official regulation temper its enthusiasm somewhat. At Delphi Dionysus was associated with Apollo, and there the sacred maidens went mad in the service of the two gods. In Athens he entered into civic partnership with Athena and yearly wedded the Basilinna. At Eleusis he was brought into relation with Demeter and led the march of the candidates along the Sacred Way from Athens. In Teos and Naxos he even became the paramount state deity, the "god of the city" and "protector of the most holy state."
It was as a private cult, rather than as a state religion, however, that the worship of Dionysus made its deepest impression on both Hellenic and Hellenistic life. In the private brotherhoods, the natural emotions aroused by the cult practices were allowed free play and the guaranties offered to initiates were of a very realistic order; hence the appeal of the cult was strong, particularly to the masses and to women generally. At the beginning of Aristophanes' comedy, Lysistrate, impatient with waiting, complains that if the women had been invited to the shrine of Bacchus "there would be no getting along for the crowd of timbrels." Indeed, the prominence of women in the worship of Dionysus is one of the most striking features of the cult.
Such a religion as this, which overflowed the political boundaries of states and appealed not to local interests but to certain elemental human desires and emotions, had a great opportunity in the Helenistic period. With the conquests of Alexander the eastern Mediterranean world was thrown open to Dionysian influence. It is difficult, however, to trace the independent existence and influence of Bacchic mysteries for the simple reason that they fused so readily with similar cults all over the Mediterranean area. The religion of Dionysus lived on in altered form in Orphism. In Asia Minor it merged with the cults of Attis and Sabazius. Plutarch noted the affinity between the rites and legends of Adonis and their Dionysian counterparts, while Tibullus, in one of his elegies, clearly recorded the identification of Dionysus and Osiris.
Notwithstanding this widespread syncretism, the literature of the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman periods is full of references which show the strength and extent of peculiarly Dionysian influences. At the very beginning of the Hellenistic period stands the classical instance of the estrangement of Philip of Macedon and his queen Olympias. Plutarch was of the opinion that Bacchic orgies had much to do with this unfortunate situation. He said that Olympias was more zealous than all the rest of the women of that country in her devotion to Dionysian orgies and
"carried out these rites of possession and ecstasy in very barbarous fashion. She introduced huge tame serpents into the Bacchic assemblies, and these kept creeping out of the ivy and mystic likna and twining themselves around the thyrsi of the women and their garlands and frightening the men out of their senses."
Philip was jealous and suspicious of his queen's exclusive devotion to the Dionysus cult. In Italy, at the beginning of the second century B.C., Dionysus worship spread with such rapidity and created such a disturbance in society that the Senate, as a result of reported excesses, took strenuous measures for the suppression of the cult. The affair ended with the promulgation of rigid regulations governing the conditions under which meetings of the brotherhood might be held. The Sicilian Diodorus, writing in the Augustan age, said, "In many of the Hellenic states every other year, Bacchic bands of women collect, and it is lawful for maidens to carry the thyrsus and join in the enthusiasm; while the women forming in groups, offer sacrifices to the god, and revel, celebrating with hymns the presence of Dionysus." Plutarch, in his writing, made many references to Dionysian practices and told strange tales concerning the Bacchantes of Delphi especially. Once when the thyiades on Parnassus were overtaken by a violent snowstorm, the good people of Delphi went out to rescue them, and their coats actually crumbled to pieces they were frozen so hard. Again, during a sacred war between Phocis and Delphi, the thyiades lost their way and came to Amphissa without realizing where they were. Here they threw themselves down in the agora and fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. The women of the city guarded them so long as they were asleep, refreshed them when they awakened, and set them on their homeward way in safety. These tales are recalled in order to show the reverence with which the devotees of Dionysus were held in the first Christian century. Pliny told of the popularity of the Dionysian cult in Thrace even in his day, while Pausanias referred to the worship of the god in many widely scattered localities. Even in the later days of paganism, Firmicuss Maternus said that the Cretans still practiced their orgiastic rites in honor of Dionysus.
These are but samples of an array of evidence which might be assembled to prove the widespread influence of the Bacchic type of experience with all of its excessive emotionalism in the first-century Graeco-Roman world. People in general were thoroughly familiar with it, as contemporary literature fully proves. Accordingly, in reckoning up the satisfactions offered by pagan religions to the seekers for salvation in the day of Jesus and Paul, the emotional rebirth experience in the Dionysian cult be counted as significant.
Chapter 43. Dionysus.
IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that in antiquity the civilised nations of Western Asia and Egypt pictured to themselves the changes of the seasons, and particularly the annual growth and decay of vegetation, as episodes in the life of gods, whose mournful death and happy resurrection they celebrated with dramatic rites of alternate lamentation and rejoicing. But if the celebration was in form dramatic, it was in substance magical; that is to say, it was intended, on the principles of sympathetic magic, to ensure the vernal regeneration of plants and the multiplication of animals, which had seemed to be menaced by the inroads of winter. In the ancient world, however, such ideas and such rites were by no means confined to the Oriental peoples of Babylon and Syria, of Phrygia and Egypt; they were not a product peculiar to the religious mysticism of the dreamy East, but were shared by the races of livelier fancy and more mercurial temperament who inhabited the shores and islands of the Aegean. We need not, with some enquirers in ancient and modern times, suppose that these Western peoples borrowed from the older civilisation of the Orient the conception of the Dying and Reviving God, together with the solemn ritual, in which that conception was dramatically set forth before the eyes of the worshippers. More probably the resemblance which may be traced in this respect between the religions of the East and West is no more than what we commonly, though incorrectly, call a fortuitous coincidence, the effect of similar causes acting alike on the similar constitution of the human mind in different countries and under different skies. The Greek had no need to journey into far countries to learn the vicissitudes of the seasons, to mark the fleeting beauty of the damask rose, the transient glory of the golden corn, the passing splendour of the purple grapes. Year by year in his own beautiful land he beheld, with natural regret, the bright pomp of summer fading into the gloom and stagnation of winter, and year by year he hailed with natural delight the outburst of fresh life in spring. Accustomed to personify the forces of nature, to tinge her cold abstractions with the warm hues of imagination, to clothe her naked realities with the gorgeous drapery of a mythic fancy, he fashioned for himself a train of gods and goddesses, of spirits and elves, out of the shifting panorama of the seasons, and followed the annual fluctuations of their fortunes with alternate emotions of cheerfulness and dejection, of gladness and sorrow, which found their natural expression in alternate rites of rejoicing and lamentation, of revelry and mourning. A consideration of some of the Greek divinities who thus died and rose again from the dead may furnish us with a series of companion pictures to set side by side with the sad figures of Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. We begin with Dionysus. 1
The god Dionysus or Bacchus is best known to us as a personification of the vine and of the exhilaration produced by the juice of the grape. His ecstatic worship, characterised by wild dances, thrilling music, and tipsy excess, appears to have originated among the rude tribes of Thrace, who were notoriously addicted to drunkenness. Its mystic doctrines and extravagant rites were essentially foreign to the clear intelligence and sober temperament of the Greek race. Yet appealing as it did to that love of mystery and that proneness to revert to savagery which seem to be innate in most men, the religion spread like wildfire through Greece until the god whom Homer hardly deigned to notice had become the most popular figure of the pantheon. The resemblance which his story and his ceremonies present to those of Osiris have led some enquirers both in ancient and modern times to hold that Dionysus was merely a disguised Osiris, imported directly from Egypt into Greece. But the great preponderance of evidence points to his Thracian origin, and the similarity of the two worships is sufficiently explained by the similarity of the ideas and customs on which they were founded. 2
While the vine with its clusters was the most characteristic manifestation of Dionysus, he was also a god of trees in general. Thus we are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to “Dionysus of the tree.” In Boeotia one of his titles was “Dionysus in the tree.” His image was often merely an upright post, without arms, but draped in a mantle, with a bearded mask to represent the head, and with leafy boughs projecting from the head or body to show the nature of the deity. On a vase his rude effigy is depicted appearing out of a low tree or bush. At Magnesia on the Maeander an image of Dionysus is said to have been found in a plane-tree, which had been broken by the wind. He was the patron of cultivated trees: prayers were offered to him that he would make the trees grow; and he was especially honoured by husbandmen, chiefly fruit-growers, who set up an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in their orchards. He was said to have discovered all tree-fruits, amongst which apples and figs are particularly mentioned; and he was referred to as “well-fruited,” “he of the green fruit,” and “making the fruit to grow.” One of his titles was “teeming” or “bursting” (as of sap or blossoms); and there was a Flowery Dionysus in Attica and at Patrae in Achaia. The Athenians sacrificed to him for the prosperity of the fruits of the land. Amongst the trees particularly sacred to him, in addition to the vine, was the pine-tree. The Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular pine-tree “equally with the god,” so they made two images of Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies. In art a wand, tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god or his worshippers. Again, the ivy and the fig-tree were especially associated with him. In the Attic township of Acharnae there was a Dionysus Ivy; at Lacedaemon there was a Fig Dionysus; and in Naxos, where figs were called meilicha, there was a Dionysus Meilichios, the face of whose image was made of fig-wood. 3
Further, there are indications, few but significant, that Dionysus was conceived as a deity of agriculture and the corn. He is spoken of as himself doing the work of a husbandman: he is reported to have been the first to yoke oxen to the plough, which before had been dragged by hand alone; and some people found in this tradition the clue to the bovine shape in which, as we shall see, the god was often supposed to present himself to his worshippers. Thus guiding the ploughshare and scattering the seed as he went, Dionysus is said to have eased the labour of the husbandman. Further, we are told that in the land of the Bisaltae, a Thracian tribe, there was a great and fair sanctuary of Dionysus, where at his festival a bright light shone forth at night as a token of an abundant harvest vouchsafed by the diety; but if the crops were to fail that year, the mystic light was not seen, darkness brooded over the sanctuary as at other times. Moreover, among the emblems of Dionysus was the winnowing-fan, that is the large open shovel-shaped basket, which down to modern times has been used by farmers to separate the grain from the chaff by tossing the corn in the air. This simple agricultural instrument figured in the mystic rites of Dionysus; indeed the god is traditionally said to have been placed at birth in a winnowing-fan as in a cradle: in art he is represented as an infant so cradled; and from these traditions and representations he derived the epithet of Liknites, that is, “He of the Winnowing-fan.” 4
Like other gods of vegetation Dionysus was believed to have died a violent death, but to have been brought to life again; and his sufferings, death, and resurrection were enacted in his sacred rites. His tragic story is thus told by the poet Nonnus. Zeus in the form of a serpent visited Persephone, and she bore him Zagreus, that is, Dionysus, a horned infant. Scarcely was he born, when the babe mounted the throne of his father Zeus and mimicked the great god by brandishing the lightning in his tiny hand. But he did not occupy the throne long; for the treacherous Titans, their faces whitened with chalk, attacked him with knives while he was looking at himself in a mirror. For a time he evaded their assaults by turning himself into various shapes, assuming the likeness successively of Zeus and Cronus, of a young man, of a lion, a horse, and a serpent. Finally, in the form of a bull, he was cut to pieces by the murderous knives of his enemies. His Cretan myth, as related by Firmicus Maternus, ran thus. He was said to have been the bastard son of Jupiter, a Cretan king. Going abroad, Jupiter transferred the throne and sceptre to the youthful Dionysus, but, knowing that his wife Juno cherished a jealous dislike of the child, he entrusted Dionysus to the care of guards upon whose fidelity he believed he could rely. Juno, however, bribed the guards, and amusing the child with rattles and a cunningly-wrought looking glass lured him into an ambush, where her satellites, the Titans, rushed upon him, cut him limb from limb, boiled his body with various herbs, and ate it. But his sister Minerva, who had shared in the deed, kept his heart and gave it to Jupiter on his return, revealing to him the whole history of the crime. In his rage, Jupiter put the Titans to death by torture, and, to soothe his grief for the loss of his son, made an image in which he enclosed the child’s heart, and then built a temple in his honour. In this version a Euhemeristic turn has been given to the myth by representing Jupiter and Juno (Zeus and Hera) as a king and queen of Crete. The guards referred to are the mythical Curetes who danced a war-dance round the infant Dionysus, as they are said to have done round the infant Zeus. Very noteworthy is the legend, recorded both by Nonnus and Firmicus, that in his infancy Dionysus occupied for a short time the throne of his father Zeus. So Proclus tells us that “Dionysus was the last king of the gods appointed by Zeus. For his father set him on the kingly throne, and placed in his hand the sceptre, and made him king of all the gods of the world.” Such traditions point to a custom of temporarily investing the king’s son with the royal dignity as a preliminary to sacrificing him instead of his father. Pomegranates were supposed to have sprung from the blood of Dionysus, as anemones from the blood of Adonis and violets from the blood of Attis: hence women refrained from eating seeds of pomegranates at the festival of the Thesmophoria. According to some, the severed limbs of Dionysus were pieced together, at the command of Zeus, by Apollo, who buried them on Parnassus. The grave of Dionysus was shown in the Delphic temple beside a golden statue of Apollo. However, according to another account, the grave of Dionysus was at Thebes, where he is said to have been torn in pieces. Thus far the resurrection of the slain god is not mentioned, but in other versions of the myth it is variously related. According to one version, which represented Dionysus as a son of Zeus and Demeter, his mother pieced together his mangled limbs and made him young again. In others it is simply said that shortly after his burial he rose from the dead and ascended up to heaven; or that Zeus raised him up as he lay mortally wounded; or that Zeus swallowed the heart of Dionysus and then begat him afresh by Semele, who in the common legend figures as mother of Dionysus. Or, again, the heart was pounded up and given in a potion to Semele, who thereby conceived him. 5
Turning from the myth to the ritual, we find that the Cretans celebrated a biennial festival at which the passion of Dionysus was represented in every detail. All that he had done or suffered in his last moments was enacted before the eyes of his worshippers, who tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth and roamed the woods with frantic shouts. In front of them was carried a casket supposed to contain the sacred heart of Dionysus, and to the wild music of flutes and cymbals they mimicked the rattles by which the infant god had been lured to his doom. Where the resurrection formed part of the myth, it also was acted at the rites, and it even appears that a general doctrine of resurrection, or at least of immortality, was inculcated on the worshippers; for Plutarch, writing to console his wife on the death of their infant daughter, comforts her with the thought of the immortality of the soul as taught by tradition and revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus. A different form of the myth of the death and resurrection of Dionysus is that he descended into Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead. The local Argive tradition was that he went down through the Alcyonian lake; and his return from the lower world, in other words his resurrection, was annually celebrated on the spot by the Argives, who summoned him from the water by trumpet blasts, while they threw a lamb into the lake as an offering to the warder of the dead. Whether this was a spring festival does not appear, but the Lydians certainly celebrated the advent of Dionysus in spring; the god was supposed to bring the season with him. Deities of vegetation, who are believed to pass a certain portion of each year underground, naturally come to be regarded as gods of the lower world or of the dead. Both Dionysus and Osiris were so conceived. 6
A feature in the mythical character of Dionysus, which at first sight appears inconsistent with his nature as a deity of vegetation, is that he was often conceived and represented in animal shape, especially in the form, or at least with the horns, of a bull. Thus he is spoken of as “cow-born,” “bull,” “bull-shaped,” “bull-faced,” “bull-browed,” “bull-horned,” “horn-bearing,” “two-horned,” “horned.” He was believed to appear, at least occasionally, as a bull. His images were often, as at Cyzicus, made in bull shape, or with bull horns; and he was painted with horns. Types of the horned Dionysus are found amongst the surviving monuments of antiquity. On one statuette he appears clad in a bull’s hide, the head, horns, and hoofs hanging down behind. Again, he is represented as a child with clusters of grapes round his brow, and a calf’s head, with sprouting horns, attached to the back of his head. On a red-figured vase the god is portrayed as a calf-headed child seated on a woman’s lap. The people of Cynaetha held a festival of Dionysus in winter, when men, who had greased their bodies with oil for the occasion, used to pick out a bull from the herd and carry it to the sanctuary of the god. Dionysus was supposed to inspire their choice of the particular bull, which probably represented the deity himself; for at his festivals he was believed to appear in bull form. The women of Elis hailed him as a bull, and prayed him to come with his bull’s foot. They sang, “Come hither, Dionysus, to thy holy temple by the sea; come with the Graces to thy temple, rushing with thy bull’s foot, O goodly bull, O goodly bull!” The Bacchanals of Thrace wore horns in imitation of their god. According to the myth, it was in the shape of a bull that he was torn to pieces by the Titans; and the Cretans, when they acted the sufferings and death of Dionysus, tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth. Indeed, the rending and devouring of live bulls and calves appear to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites. When we consider the practice of portraying the god as a bull or with some of the features of the animal, the belief that he appeared in bull form to his worshippers at the sacred rites, and the legend that in bull form he had been torn in pieces, we cannot doubt that in rending and devouring a live bull at his festival the worshippers of Dionysus believed themselves to be killing the god, eating his flesh, and drinking his blood. 7
Another animal whose form Dionysus assumed was the goat. One of his names was “Kid.” At Athens and at Hermion he was worshipped under the title of “the one of the Black Goatskin,” and a legend ran that on a certain occasion he had appeared clad in the skin from which he took the title. In the wine-growing district of Phlius, where in autumn the plain is still thickly mantled with the red and golden foliage of the fading vines, there stood of old a bronze image of a goat, which the husbandmen plastered with gold-leaf as a means of protecting their vines against blight. The image probably represented the vine-god himself. To save him from the wrath of Hera, his father Zeus changed the youthful Dionysus into a kid; and when the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a goat. Hence when his worshippers rent in pieces a live goat and devoured it raw, they must have believed that they were eating the body and blood of the god. The custom of tearing in pieces the bodies of animals and of men and then devouring them raw has been practised as a religious rite by savages in modern times. We need not therefore dismiss as a fable the testimony of antiquity to the observance of similar rites among the frenzied worshippers of Bacchus. 8
The custom of killing a god in animal form, which we shall examine more in detail further on, belongs to a very early stage of human culture, and is apt in later times to be misunderstood. The advance of thought tends to strip the old animal and plant gods of their bestial and vegetable husk, and to leave their human attributes (which are always the kernel of the conception) as the final and sole residuum. In other words, animal and plant gods tend to become purely anthropomorphic. When they have become wholly or nearly so, the animals and plants which were at first the deities themselves, still retain a vague and ill-understood connexion with the anthropomorphic gods who have developed out of them. The origin of the relationship between the deity and the animal or plant having been forgotten, various stories are invented to explain it. These explanations may follow one of two lines according as they are based on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the sacred animal or plant. The sacred animal was habitually spared, and only exceptionally slain; and accordingly the myth might be devised to explain either why it was spared or why it was killed. Devised for the former purpose, the myth would tell of some service rendered to the deity by the animal; devised for the latter purpose, the myth would tell of some injury inflicted by the animal on the god. The reason given for sacrificing goats to Dionysus exemplifies a myth of the latter sort. They were sacrificed to him, it was said, because they injured the vine. Now the goat, as we have seen, was originally an embodiment of the god himself. But when the god had divested himself of his animal character and had become essentially anthropomorphic, the killing of the goat in his worship came to be regarded no longer as a slaying of the deity himself, but as a sacrifice offered to him; and since some reason had to be assigned why the goat in particular should be sacrificed, it was alleged that this was a punishment inflicted on the goat for injuring the vine, the object of the god’s especial care. Thus we have the strange spectacle of a god sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy. And as the deity is supposed to partake of the victim offered to him, it follows that, when the victim is the god’s old self, the god eats of his own flesh. Hence the goat-god Dionysus is represented as eating raw goat’s blood; and the bull-god Dionysus is called “eater of bulls.” On the analogy of these instances we may conjecture that wherever a deity is described as the eater of a particular animal, the animal in question was originally nothing but the deity himself. Later on we shall find that some savages propitiate dead bears and whales by offering them portions of their own bodies. 9
All this, however, does not explain why a deity of vegetation should appear in animal form. But the consideration of that point had better be deferred till we have discussed the character and attributes of Demeter. Meantime it remains to mention that in some places, instead of an animal, a human being was torn in pieces at the rites of Dionysus. This was the practice in Chios and Tenedos; and at Potniae in Boeotia the tradition ran that it had been formerly the custom to sacrifice to the goat-smiting Dionysus a child, for whom a goat was afterwards substituted. At Orchomenus, as we have seen, the human victim was taken from the women of an old royal family. As the slain bull or goat represented the slain god, so, we may suppose, the human victim also represented him. 10
The legends of the deaths of Pentheus and Lycurgus, two kings who are said to have been torn to pieces, the one by Bacchanals, the other by horses, for their opposition to the rites of Dionysus, may be, as I have already suggested, distorted reminiscences of a custom of sacrificing divine kings in the character of Dionysus and of dispersing the fragments of their broken bodies over the fields for the purpose of fertilising them. It is probably no mere coincidence that Dionysus himself is said to have been torn in pieces at Thebes, the very place where according to legend the same fate befell king Pentheus at the hands of the frenzied votaries of the vine-god. 11
However, a tradition of human sacrifice may sometimes have been a mere misinterpretation of a sacrificial ritual in which an animal victim was treated as a human being. For example, at Tenedos the new-born calf sacrificed to Dionysus was shod in buskins, and the mother cow was tended like a woman in child-bed. At Rome a shegoat was sacrificed to Vedijovis as if it were a human victim. Yet on the other hand it is equally possible, and perhaps more probable, that these curious rites were themselves mitigations of an older and ruder custom of sacrificing human beings, and that the later pretence of treating the sacrificial victims as if they were human beings was merely part of a pious and merciful fraud, which palmed off on the deity less precious victims than living men and women. This interpretation is supported by many undoubted cases in which animals have been substituted for human victims. 12
SKETCH
FOR
THE HISTORY
OF THE
DIONYSIAN ARTIFICERS
A FRAGMENT
BY
HIPPOLYTO JOSEPH DA COSTA, ESQ.
LONDON
SOLD BY MESSRS. SHERWOOD, NEELY, AND JONES,
PATERNOSTER-ROW.
1820
Price Three Shillings.
Scanned at sacred-texts.com, June 2002, J.B. Hare redactor.
THE mysteries of the ancients, and the associations in which their doctrines were taught, have hardly been considered in modern times, but with a view to decry and ridicule them.
The systems of ancient mythology have been treated as monstrous absurdities, debasing the human reason, conducting to idolatry, and favouring depravity of manners.
However, they deserve attention, if the motives of their inventors, rather than the profligacy and ignorance of their corruptors be contemplated.
When men were deprived of the light of revelation, those who formed systems of morality to guide their fellow creatures, according to the dictates of improved reason, deserved the thanks of mankind, however deficient those systems might be, or time may have altered them; respect, not derision, ought to attend the efforts of those good men; though their labours might have proved unavailing.
In this point of view must be considered an association, traced to the most remote antiquity, and preserved through numberless viscissitudes, yet retaining the original marks of its foundation, scope, and tenets.
It appears, that, at a very early period, some contemplative men were desirous of deducting from the observation of nature, moral rules for the conduct of mankind. Astronomy was the science selected for this purpose; architecture was afterwards called in aid of this system; and its followers formed a society or sect, which will be the object of this enquiry.
The continuity of this system will be found sometimes broken, a natural effect of conflicting theories, of the alteration of manners, and of change of circumstances, but it will make its appearances at different periods, and the same truth will be seen constantly.
The importance of calculating with precision the seasons of the year, to regulate agricultural pursuits, navigation, and other necessary avocations in life, must have made the science of astronomy an object of great care, in the government of all civilized nations; and the prediction of eclipses, and other phenomena, must have obtained for the learned in this science, such respect and veneration from the ignorant multitude, as to render it extremely useful to legislators, in framing laws for regulating the moral conduct of their people.
The laws of nature and the moral rules deducted from them were explained in allegorical histories, which we call fables, and those allegorical histories were impressed in the memory by symbolical ceremonies denominated mysteries, and which, though afterwards misunderstood and misapplied, contain
systems of the most profound, the most sublime, and the most useful theory of philosophy.
Amongst those mysteries are peculiary remarkable the Eleusinian. Dionysius, Bacchus, Orisis, Adonis, Thamuz, Apollo, &c., were names adopted in various languages, and in several countries, to designate the Divinity, who was the object of those ceremonies, and it is generally admitted that the sun was meant by these several denominations. 1
Let us begin with a fact, not disputed, that in these ceremonies, a death and resurrection was represented, and that the interval between death and resurrection was sometimes three days, sometimes fifteen days.
Now, by the concurrent testimony of all ancient authors 2 the deities called Osiris, Adonis, Bacchus, &c. were names given to, or types, representing the sun, considered in different situations, and contemplated under various points of view. 3
Therefore, these symbolic representations, which described the sun as dead, that is to say, hidden for three days under the horizon, must have originated in a climate, where the sun, when in the lower hemisphere, is, at a certain season of the
year, concealed for three days from the view of the inhabitants.
Such climate is, in fact, to be found as far north as latitude 66°, and it is reasonable to conclude, that, from a people living near the polar circle, the worship of the sun, with such ceremonies, must have originated; and some have supposed that this people were the Atlantides. 1
The worship of the sun is generally traced to Mitraic rites, and those invented by the Magi of Persia. But if the sun could be made an object of veneration, if the preservation of fire could be thought deserving of religious ceremonies, it is more natural that it should be with a people living in a frozen clime, to whom the sun is the greatest comfort, whose absence under the horizon for three days is a deplorable event, and whose appearance above the horizon a real source of joy.
Not so in Persia, where the sun is never hidden for three days together under the horizon, and where its piercing rays are so far from being a source of pleasure, that to be screened from them, to enjoy cool shades, is one of those comforts, to obtain which all the ingenuity of art is exerted. The worship, therefore, of the sun, and the keeping sacred fires, must have been a foreign introduction into Persia.
The conjecture is strengthened by some important facts, which, referring to astronomical, allusions, place the scene out of Persia, though the theory is found there.
In the Boun Dehesch (translated by Anquetil Du Perron page 400) we find, that "the longest day of the summer is equal to the two shortest of the winter; and that the longest
night in the winter is equal to the two shortest nights in summer."
This circumstance can only take place at the latitude of 49° 20', where the longest day of the year is of sixteen hours ten minutes, and the shortest of eight hours five minutes.
This latitude is far beyond the limits of Persia, where history places Zoroaster, to whom the sacred doctrines; of the Persian book Boun Dehesch are attributed. This proportion, then, of days and nights, as a general rule could only be true in Scythia, whether at the sources of the Irtisch, the Oby, the Jenisci, or the Slinger.
We know nothing of the antient history of those Scythians or Massagetes, but we know that they disputed their antiquity with the Egyptians, 1 and that the above principle, though attributed to the Persian Zoroaster, is only applicable to the country of those Scythians.
But let the origin of the mysteries of the sun begin where it may, they were celebrated in Greece, in various places, amongst others, at Appollonia, a city dedicated to Apollo, and situated in latitude 41° 22'. 2 In this latitude the longest day has fifteen hours, differing three hours from the length of the day when the sun is on the equinoxial: the reverse is the case with the nights.
This circumstance will account for the preservation of three days in these mysteries, even when celebrated in Greece, and
also for the fifteen days, or representation of the number of fifteen in some of the Eleusinian rites.
The mysterious numbers were employed to designate such and similar operations of nature, for it is said that the Pythagorean symbols and secrets were borrowed from the Orphic or Eleusinian rites; and that they consisted in the study of the sciences and useful arts, united with theology and ethics, and were communicated in cyphers and symbols. 1 Similar intimations, as to the mystic import of numbers are found in many other authors. 2
The letters, representing numbers formed cabalistic names, expressive of the essential qualities of those things they meant to represent; and even the Greeks, when they translated foreign names, whose cabalistic import they knew, so they rendered them by Greek letters, as to preserve the same interpretation in numbers, which we find exemplified in the name Nile. 3
But in the number three to which so many mystical and moral allusions were made, had a reference to the three celestial circles, two of which the sun touches, passing over the third in its annual course. 1
The mysteries of Eleusis, the same as those of Dionysius or Bacchus, were supposed by some to have been introduced into Greece by Orpheus: 2 they may have come there from Egypt, but Egypt may have received them at a previous period from the Persians, and these again from the Scythians; but taking them only as we find them in Greece, we will give here an outline of their ceremonies.
The aspirant for these mysteries was not admitted a candidate till he had arrived at a certain age, and particular persons were appointed to examine and prepare him for the rites of
initiation. 1 Those, whose conduct was found irregular, or who had been guilty of attrocious crimes, were rejected, those found worthy of admittance were then instructed by significant symbols in the principles of society. 2
At the ceremony of admission into these mysteries, the candidate was first shown into a dark room, called the mystical chapel. 3 There certain questions were put to him. When introduced, the holy book was brought forward, from between two pillars or stones: 4 he was rewarded by the vision: 5 a multitude of extraordinary lights were presented to him, some of which are worthy of particular remark.
He stood on a sheep skin; the person opposite was called the revealer of sacred things 6 and he was also clothed in a sheep skin or with a veil of purple, and on his right shoulder a mule skin spotted or variegated, representing the rays of the sun and stars. 7 At a certain distance stood the
torch-bearer, 1 who represented the sun; and beside the altar was a third person, who represented the moon. 2
Thus we preceive, that over those assemblies presided three persons, in different employments, and we may remark, that in the government of the caravans in the eastern countries, three persons also direct them, though there are five principal officers, besides the three mathematicians; those three persons are, the commander in chief, who rules all; the captain of the march, who has the ruling power, as long as the caravan moves; and the captain of the rest, or refreshment, who assumes the government, as soon as the caravan stops to refresh. 3
Some authors have observed the same division of power, in the march of the Israelites through the wilderness, and consider Moses as the captain general, Joshua the captain of the march; and perhaps Aaron as the captain of the rest. 1
The society of which we are speaking, was ruled by three persons, with different duties assigned to them, by a custom of the most remote antiquity.
The mysteries, however, were not communicated at once, but by gradations, 2 in three different parts. The business of the initiation, properly speaking was divided into five sections, as we find in a passage of Theo, who compares philosophy to those mystic rites. 3
These ceremonies, thus far, appear to contain the lesser mysteries, or the first and second stages of the candidate in his
progress through the course of his initiations. There was, however, a third stage, when the candidate, himself, was made symbolically to approach death, and then return to life. 1
In this third stage of the ceremony, the candidate was stretched upon the couch, 2 to represent his death.
As to the festivities, in which those mysteries were celebrated, we find that on the 17th of the month Athyr 3 the images of Osiris were enclosed in a coffin or ark: on the 18th was the search; 4 and on the 19th was the finding. 5
Thug in fables or symbolical histories, relating to these mysteries, we find Adonis slain and resuscitated; the Syrian women weeping for Thamuz, &c.
Let us now examine what was meant by this symbolical
death and resurrection, or by certain personages, said to have visited the Hades, and returning up again. 1
It appears that this type in all its various forms and denominations,
indicated the sun passing to the lower hemisphere, and coming again to the upper. 1
The Egyptians, who observed this worship of the sun, under the name of Osiris, represented the sun in the figure of an old man, just before the winter solstice, and typified him by Serapis, having the constellation of Leo opposite to him, the Serpent or Hydra under him, the Wolf on the east of the Lion, and the Dog on the west. This is the state of the southern hemisphere at midnight about that period of the year.
The same Egyptians represented the sun by the boy Harpocrates, at the vernal equinox; and then was the festivity of the death, burial, and resurrection of Osiris; that is to say, the sun in the lower hemisphere; just coming up, and rising above in the upper hemisphere.
In this upper situation the sun was called Horus, Mithras, &c. and hailed as sol invictus. We will now point out some other symbols to express the same phenomena, though different from those types we are treating of at present.
In the Mithraical astronomical monuments, where the figure of a man is represented conquering and killing a bull, there are two figures by their sides with torches; one pointing downwards, the other, upwards.
These monuments, where the mysteries in question were depicted, the man killing and conquering the bull, represent the sun, passing to the upper hemisphere, through the sign of Taurus, which in that remote period (four thousand six hundred years before our era) was the equinoxal sign. The two
torch-bearers, the one pointing his torch downwards, the other upwards, represent the sun passing down to the lower hemisphere, and coming up again. 1
At the remote time before alluded to, the sun entered the sign Taurus, at the summer equinox, and the year was begun at this period among the Egyptian astronomers. 2 Afterwards, in consequence of the precession of the equinoxes, the summer equinox took place in the sign of Aries; hence part of the Egyptians transferred their worship from the bull or calf to the ram; 3 while others continued to worship the bull. 4
We may explain this in the language of our modern astronomers by saying, that some of the learned Egyptians continued to reckon by the moveable zodiac, while others reckoned the year by the fixed zodiac; and this circumstance produced a division of sects in the people, as it was a division of opinion, amongst the learned.
Likewise, by the same precession of the equinoxes, the sun
passed from Aries to Pisces in the vernal equinox, about three hundred and thirty eight years before our era; yet the beginning of the year continued to be reckoned from Aries. If the Egyptian astronomy and Egyptian religion had then existed with the same vigour, both would have perhaps suffered a similar alteration; but the Egyptian systems were at that period nearly annihilated. We may observe, however, that the Christians, at the beginning of our era, marked their tombs; with fishes, as an emblem of Christianity, to distinguish their sepulchers from those of the heathens, by a symbol unknown to them.
Returning from this short digression to our immediate purpose, we have to observe, that if those ceremonies and symbols were meant to represent the sun, and the laws of its motions, these very phenomena of nature were studied with a moral view, as being themselves types or arguments to a more sublime or metaphysical philosophy; and the moral rules therefrom deducted, were impressed on the memory by those lively images and representations.
The emerging of the sun into the lower hemisphere, and its returning, was contemplated either as a proof or as a symbol of the immortality of the soul; one of the most important, as well as the most sublime tenets of the Platonic Philosophy. 1
The doctrines of the spirituality and immortality of the soul, explained by those symbols, were very little understood, even by the initiated; thus we find some of them 1 took those types to signify merely the present body, by their descriptions of the infernal abodes; whereas, the true meaning of these mysteries inculcated the doctrine of a future state of the soul, and future rewards and punishments; and that such were the doctrines of those philosophers is shown by many and indisputable authorities. 2
The union of the soul with the body was considered as the death of the soul; its; separation as the resurrection of the soul; 3 and such ceremonies and types were intended to impress the doctrine of the immersion of the soul into matter as is well attested. 4
By the emblem of the sun descending into the lower hemisphere was also represented the soul of the man, who through ignorance and uncultivation, was in a state compared to sleep, or almost dead; which mystery was intended to stimulate man to the learning of sciences. 1
The Egyptians also considered matter as a species of mud or mire, in which the soul was immerged; 2 and in an ancient author we find a recapitulation of these theories in the same sense. 3
The Persians, who followed the tenets of Zerdoust, called by the Greeks Zoroaster, having received the same doctrines upon the mystical contemplation of the sun, made also the same metaphysical application to the soul, of the passage of the sun through the signs; of the zodiac. 1
The sun, moreover, was considered as the symbol of the active principle; whereas the moon and earth were symbols of the passive. 2
The sun itself, considering its beneficial influence in the physical world, was chosen as; the symbol of the Deity, though afterwards taken by the vulgar as a Deity. 3
It must be here particularly observed, that the different names, which the Egyptians (from whom the Greeks learnt them) gave to God, instead of meaning several gods were only expressions of the different productive effects of the only one God. 1 Not very different from
what the Jews derive from the great name Tetragramaton. 1
The fables, allegories, and types of the ancients, being of three classes, 2 import some times various meanings; therefore, some of the ceremonies to which sublime import is attached, are also applied to typify less dignified operations, in the natural system. Thus, for instance, the fable of Proserpine, which alludes to the immersion of the soul into the body, was also employed to symbolize the operation of the seed in the ground. 3
But the general doctrine of Plato of the descent of the soul into the darkness; of the body, the perils of the passions, the torments of vices, appears to be perfectly described by Virgil; 4 though this Poet was of the Epicurean sect, the most fashionable in his days.
The lesser mysteries represented, as we have seen, the descent of the soul into the body, and the pains therein suffered. The greater mysteries were intended to typify the splendid visions, or the happy state of the soul, both here and hereafter, when purified from the defilements of material nature. These doctrines are also inculcated, by the fables of the fortunate islands, the Elysian fields, &c. The different purifications in these rites were symbols of the gradation of virtues, necessary to the re-ascent of the soul. Inward purity, of which external
purifications were symbols, can only be obtained by the exercise of these virtues. 1
To the allusion of these virtues must be understood what Socrates says, 2 that it is the business of the philosophers to study to die and to be themselves death; and as at the same time he reprobates suicide, such death cannot mean any other but philosophical death, or the exercise of what he calls the cathartic virtues.
If such was the meaning and import of the Eleusinian and Dionysian rites, symbols, and ceremonies, it must be allowed that a society or sect, which was employed in the contemplation of such sublime truths, cannot be looked upon as trifling or profligate.
The very Christian Fathers, who so strongly attacked the Pagan religion, confessed the utility of these symbols; 3 and that the circumstances previous to initiation into those mysteries,
tended to exclude impious notions, and prepare the mind to hear the truth. 1
Those mysteries were concealed from the vulgar; because it would be a ridiculous prostitution of such sublime theories to disclose them to the multitude incapable of understanding them, when even many of the initiates, for want of study and application, did not comprehend the whole meaning of the symbols.
The multitude were told only in the abstract, the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments, and were made acquainted with the calendar, the result of astronomical observations; the knowledge of which was connected with their festivities and agricultural pursuits. They were likewise taught other practical parts of science calculated for general use.
The secrecy of these mysteries was the first cause of obloquy against them; next came, beyond doubt, the depravity of their followers, and the perversion of those assemblies into convivial meetings first, and then into the most debauched associations.
Secrecy, also, was enjoined by the laws, it was death to reveal any thing belonging to the Eleusinian mysteries; to disclose imprudently any thing about them, was supposed even indecorous; of this we find a very conspicuous; instance in Plutarch. 2
Out of respect for this custom the scholars were, in general, only instructed in the exoteric doctrines. 1 The acroamatic doctrines were taught only to the few select, by private communication and viva voce.
Rut when the ignorance of the very teachers of those mysteries caused their forms only to be attended to, the essence was lost, the shadow only remained; and, then, even those forms and ceremonies were frequented by persons, ignorant of their import, and wicked enough to turn them to their private interests, as a machine employed in deceiving the people, and to occasions of debauchery and depravity. We shall give an example of this,
The mysteries of Eleusis, or the Sun, were united or analogous to those of Dionysius or Bacchus; because, according to the Orphic theology, the intellect of every planet was denominated Bacchus: so when the sun was considered as the spiritual intelligence, who moved or caused this planet to move, in its annual circle, he was denominated Trietericus Bacchus. 2
The ceremonies, therefore, of Bacchus, were attended with rejoicings, as the triumph of the spirit over matter; but this circumstance, so intimately connected with the sublime notions of the Eleusinian mysteries, was completely turned into a mere banqueting, and processions of drunken people, who of the ceremonies knew nothing else, than to carry branches of trees in their hands. 1
More, still: a depraved priest introduced those Bacchanalian mysteries into Rome, for the very worst of purposes, which alarming the Senate, the most severe punishment was inflicted on him and his followers. 2
In consequence of those abuses, it was, that Socrates refused to be initiated, 3 and the same did Diogenes, alledging that Patæcion, a notorious robber, had obtained initiation: 4 Epaminondas, also, and Agesilaus never desired it. 5
But if those who were desirous of being licentious clothed themselves with those mysteries, this has nothing to do with the original tenets of the institution. For the purity of its votaries was carried, according to the primitive mysteries, to the most delicate and scrupulous point. 6
After such respectable authorities, as we have referred to, we must reject, as impudent calumnies, the assertion of Tertullian, who says, that the natural parts of a man were enclosed in the ark carried about in the processions of those mysteries: Theodoret and Arnobius say, they were the parts of a woman: such assertors had no means of ascertaining what was not known to any one, out of the precincts of those most recondite mysteries. 1
We should rather guess, that in the ark, carried in the procession, and said to enclose the body of Osiris, spheres were deposited, representing our solar system. 1
In regard to these accusations, found in some of the ecclesiastical writers, we must also observe, that many of them, led by a mistaken zeal for the Christian religion, disfigured in a most reprehensible degree, the ancient historical monuments: taking, for instance, the manner in which the history of Egypt as written by Manethon, was transmitted to us by those ecclesiastical writers: 2 others; of such writers, in fact, knew nothing of the Egyptian mysteries. 3
The conclusion, therefore, is, that the motives of those institutions were good and pure, as tending to the study of science, and practice of morality, though the same institutions
afterwards degenerated; 1 and their degeneration was followed by the ruin of the state, as predicted by Trimegistus himself,
who in this prediction proved how great a philosopher and politician he was. 1
Having thus established what was the meaning and import of the Eleusinian or Dionysian mysteries amongst the ancient Greeks, who transmitted to us the knowledge of them; and having shown that the ceremonies were not intended in their origin as a worship of the sun, considered as a Deity, we shall proceed to examine how those mysteries were communicated to other nations by the Greeks.
About fifty years 2 before the building of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, a colony of Grecians, chiefly Ionians, complaining of the narrow limits of their country, in an increased population, emigrated; and having been settled in Asia Minor, gave to that country the name of Ionia. 3
No doubt that people carried with them their manners, sciences, and religion; and the mysteries of Eleusis 1 among the rest. Accordingly we find that one of their cities, Byblos, was famed for the worship of Apollo, as Apollonia had been with their ancestors. 2
These Ionians, participating in the improved state of civilization in which their mother country, Greece, then was, cultivated the sciences, and useful arts; but made themselves most conspicuous in architecture, and invented or improved the order called by their own name Ionian.
These Ionians formed a society, whose purpose was to employ themselves in erecting buildings. The general assembly of the society, was first held at Theos; but afterwards, in consequence of some civil commotions, passed to Lebedos. 3
This sect or society was now called the Dionysian Artificers, as Bacchus was supposed to be the inventor of building theatres; and they performed the Dionysian festivities. 4 They afterwards extended themselves to Syria, Persia, and India. 5
From this period, the Science of Astronomy which had given rise to the symbols of the Dionysian rites, became connected with types taken from the art of building. 1
These Ionian societies divided themselves into different sections, or minor assemblies. 2 Some of those small or dependent associations; had also their distinguishing names. 3
But they extended their moral views, in conjunction with the art of building, to many useful purposes, and to the practice of acts of benevolence. 4
We find recorded, that these societies, and their utility, were many years afterwards inquired into, by Cambyses, king of Persia, who approved of them, and gave to them great marks of favour. 1
It is essential to observe, that these societies; had significant words to distinguish their members; 2 and for the same purpose they used emblems taken from the art of building. 3
Let us now notice the passage of the Dionysian Artificers to Judea. Solomon obtained from Hiram, king of Tyre, men skilful in the art of building, when the Temple was erected at Jerusalem. 4 Amongst the foreigners, who came on this occasion, we find men from Gabel, called Giblim; 5 that is to say, the Ionians settled in Asia Minor, for Gabbel, or Byblos, was
that city where stood the temple of Apollo, where the Eleusinian rites or Dionysian mysteries were celebrated, as we have already stated. 1
We could, in addition to this argument produce some authority; for Josephus says that the Grecian style of architecture was used at the temple of Jerusalem. 2
After this we cannot be surprised to find that the ceremonies of Eleusis, or Thamuz, should be introduced into Judea, particularly, as Solomon himself, after having entered into the scientific allusions, in the construction of the temple, was not free from the accusation of the gross superstition of idolatry. 3
So we find some years afterwards the prophet Ezekiel complaining that the Israelitish women were weeping for Thamuz
at a certain period of the year, at the very gates of the temple. 1
But it is natural to suppose that the Dionysian Artificers would not have attempted to introduce those rites amongst the religious Jews, as a mere matter of idolatry, for the worship of the sun. The ideas of the Israelites, concerning the unity of God, would have revolted at any thing, inducing a belief of the polytheism of the Gentiles.
The symbol, therefore, in these mysteries, must have been explained to the Jews, to mean only the sun, in the true and original sense of those mysteries; that is to say, as an emblem of God's goodness to man; and the apparent motions of that luminary, first as the guide for fixing the seasons; next as types or remembrances of the immortality of the soul: for this dogma does not appear either clear in the books of the Jews before that period, or universally admitted amongst them at a much later date. 2
To avoid, therefore, any allusion to idolatry in these ceremonies and symbols, another personage or another name must have been substituted for Adonis or Osiris; and as a symbolical death and resurrection was essential, in the allegory of the
system, the history of the death of another individual must have been substituted . . . . . .
However, in framing this new symbolical history, such circumstances were to be related, connected with the death of that personage, as to typify and account for the whole of the Eleusinian mysteries, or the passage of the sun from the upper to the lower hemisphere, and its return up again. 1
In the formation of this new system, or rather new allegory to the same system, though the name of the hero was changed, the circumstances must have been preserved, as far as consistent with new names . . . . . . . .
The whole fabric of the temple would favor an allusion of this sort.
The foundation stone was laid on the second day of the second month; 2 which corresponds upon an average to the 20th of April; reckoning the sacred year, upon the fixed zodiac.
Now if you rectify your globe to the latitude of Jerusalem (31.° 30') at that period of the year, you will have the sun in Aries, or the sun represented by a ram or sheep, or a man in a sheep's skin; as the hierophant was represented, in the mysteries of Eleusis. 3
Therefore, the very period of the year in which the foundation stone of the temple was laid, would afford an opportunity of establishing upon it a new allegorical system, to explain the ancient mystery.
If we suppose the globe to represent the world in the position above described, the aspirant being in the west facing the hierophant, who in the east represents; the rising sun, the candidate will find himself between the two tropics, represented by the two columns 1 which were placed on the west entrance of that temple . . . . . .
The better to understand the facility with which the ancient system could be adapted to the circumstances of the temple of Jerusalem, we must consider its typic emblems, according to the notions of the Jews, and some of the Christian fathers.
The temples built in honor of the several gods, were so shaped, as to have allusion to the supposed attributes of such gods. 2 But the universe was supposed by the Platonists to be the true temple of the true and only God. 3 The temple, therefore, dedicated to the true God, was to be a type of the universe.
Thus we find that the temple of Jerusalem was situated
east and west, and with dimensions and types all adapted to represent the universal system of nature. 1
If the temple of Solomon was a type of the universe, to
symbolize that Jehovah was no local God, but the only God, Lord of the universe; tradition also tells us that the place of assembly of the Dionysian Artificers was allegorically described
by its dimensions, as a symbol of the universe, in length, in breadth, in height, and in depth.
The ancients represented the course of the stars, by the winding of a snake; but if this snake was so placed as to have the tail in her mouth, it then represented eternity.
Now if we consider the beginning of the civil year amongst the Hebrews, the month Tisri, which was in the winter equinox; 1 the sun, proceeding from thence, approaches the south, and touches the tropic of Capricorn; then retrocedes towards the north, crossing the equinoxal, and touching the tropic of Cancer; from whence retroceding again to the south, arrives at the equinoxial, finishing the year.
These points, in an extended map of the two hemispheres seem separate; but the emblem of the snake biting its tail, would represent the end of the year, meeting the beginning. 2
Mr. Hutchinson has proved, that the globes, on the top of the two columns, at the portico of the temple, were orreries, or
mechanical representations of the motions of the heavenly bodies. 1
I think, that after those circumstances, which afforded so many facilities for the introduction of the system of the Dionysian Artificers in Judea, the continuance of the same, in subsequent periods, cannot be of difficult explanation.
We find it stated, in the Book of the Maccabees, 1 that a society existed in those days in Judea, called the Assideans or Cassideans, whose business it was to take care of the repairs of the temple.
From these Cassideans proceeded the sect or society of the Essenians, which, according to Philo and Josephus, were the same as the Assideans; and probably, because they admitted no women in their assemblies, Pliny says 2 that they were propagated without wives.
Josephus 3 mentions the first of the Essenians, in the time
of Aristobulus, and Antigonus the son of Hircanus; but Suidas 1 and others were of opinion that they were a branch of the Rechabites, who subsisted before the captivity.
Josephus, probably ignorant of the secret tenets of the Essenians, also accuses them of worshipping the sun, or saying prayers before the sun rising, as if to incite him to rise. But this very accusation, again, identifies them with the sect of the Dionysian Artificers, who, as appears by the reasons above stated, were supposed to adore the sun.
Josephus relates many other particulars, by which, in a striking manner, he brings them to what we have related of the other societies which preceded them. 2 It also points out the conformity of their ideas with those of the Platonists and Dionysians, on the nature of the soul. 3 In short, they used
symbols, allegories, and parables, after the manner of the ancients. 1
The practices of those Essenians are represented by Philo 2 as the most pacific, and full of social virtues; and those amongst them who were most enthusiastic for their tenets, had their goods in common, as the Christians had in the first ages of Christianity. 3
The Essenians had not their ceremonies and mysteries, recorded in history; but thus far we know, that they transmitted to posterity the doctrines which they received from their ancestors; 4 they had also distinguishing signs; 5 and the festival banquets; 6 though it does not appear that they followed the profession of builders or architects exclusively.
Out of Judea we find also societies distinguished by the same characters as the Essenians, and with the same tenets of Plato; for, the Pythagoreans also employed the symbols from the art of building. 1
The Dionysian Artificers existed also in Syria, Persia, and India; 2 and the Eleusinian mysteries were preserved in Europe, even at Rome, until the eighth century of the Christian era. 3
After this epoch, Europe was visited by the most barbarous nations who, persecuting every scientific research, scattered a general darkness, in which all the labours of the ancients, in favor of mankind, were nearly lost, in the general ignorance of their times.
Those very societies and sects, had also been in former periods much abused, and the ceremonies converted, as we have seen, for the worst of purposes: this was another powerful cause for their decline and ruin.
Christianity was then in Europe, the only bond of morality, by which power could, in some measure, be controuled, or restrained.
When the sciences began to revive, a general fanaticism prevailed, and a spirit of persecution appeared, which caused the ancient doctrines of philosophers, and the old systems of
morality to be regarded only as offsprings of atheism, and practices of idolatry.
Under these circumstances, the Eleusinians, the Dionysian Artificers, Assideans or Essenians, sunk into such oblivion, that no mention is made of them in history.
In the tenth century, during the wars of the crusades, some societies were instituted in Palestine, and Europe, which adopted some regulations resembling those of the ancient fraternities. But is was in England, and chiefly in Scotland, where the remains of the old system, identified with that of the Dionysian Artificers, were discovered in modern times.
Cætera desunt.
Footnotes
5:1 The number of authorities to prove this are collected in Kirker, vol. I p. 288.
Ogygia me Bacchum canit,
Osiris Egyptus putat,
Arabiæ gens Adoneum.
Ausonius in Myobarbum
Epig. 29.
5:2 Meursius has collected all the authorities and fragments found in ancient authors upon the Eleusinian ceremonies.
5:3 Plutarchus, De Iside et Osiride.
6:1 Recherches sur les Atlantides.
7:1 Herodotus.
7:2 Martiniere Dicc. Geogr. art. Appollonia.
8:1 Jamablicus. part. I cap. 32.
8:2 Plutarchus (in vitæ Numæ) says, that "to offer an odd number to the celestial gods, and an even one to the terrestrial, is proper. The sense of which precept is hidden from the vulgar."
The same Plutarchus (in vitæ Lycurgi) explaining the number of the Spartan Senators, who were 28, says, "something perhaps there is in being a perfect number formed of seven, multiplied by four, and withal the first number after six that is equal to all its parts."
Another proof of the mystic import of numbers is found in Plutarchus (in vitæ Fabii.) "The perfection of the number three consists in being the first of odd numbers, the first of plurals, and containing in itself the first differences, and the first elements of all numbers."
8:3 The fertility caused by the inundations of the Nile over the adjacent country caused this river to be considered as a mystic representation of the sun, parent of p. 9 all fecundity of the earth; and therefore a name was given to it containing the number 365, or days in the solar year. The Greeks thus preserved the name.
Ν {Greek N} | 50 |
Ε {Greek E} | 5 |
Ι {Greek I} | 10 |
Λ {Greek L} | 30 |
Ο {Greek O} | 70 |
Σ {Greek S} | 200 |
| 365 |
9:1 Potter's Grec. Antiq.
9:2 Dionysius Siculus, Lib. VI. says, that the Athenians invented the Eleusinian mysteries; but in the first book of his Library he says they were brought from Egypt by Erecteus.
Theodoret Lib. Grec. Affect, says, that it was Orpheus who invented those mysteries, imitating, however, the Egyptian festivities of Isis.
Arnobius and Lactantius describe those mysteries, as also does Clemens.
10:1 Hesichius in γδραυ {Greek gdrau}
"They were exhorted to direct their passions. Porphir. ap. Sob. Ecclog. Phis. p. 142.
To merit promotion by improving their minds. Arrian in Epictet. lib. 3 cap. 21.
10:2 Clemens, Strom. Lib. I. p. 325. Lib. VIII. p. 854.
10:3 μυςχος σηχος {Greek musxos shxos}
10:4 πετρωμα {Greek petrwma}
10:5 αντοψια {Greek antopsia}
10:6 ιεροφαντες {Greek ierofantes}
10:7 Mairobius Saturnalia. Lib. I. c. 8. I will copy here an English translation of this passage, which I have read some where.
"He who desires in pomp of sacred dress,
The Sun's resplendent body to express, p. 11
Should first a veil assume of purple bright.
Like fair white beams combined with fiery light;
On his right shoulder next, a mule's broad hide,
Widely diversified with spotted pride,
Should hang an image of the pole divine,
And doedal stars whose orbs eternal shine;
A golden splendid zone then, oe'r his vest
He next should throw, and bind it round his breast,
In mighty token how with golden light,
The rising sun from earth's last bounds, and night
Sudden emerges and with matchless force,
Darts through old Ocean's billows in his course,
A boundless splendour hence enshrined in dew,
Plays on his whirlpools, glorious to the view,
While his circumfluent waters spread abroad,
Full in the presence of the radiant god;
But Ocean's circle, like a zone of light,
The sun's wide bosom girds and charms the wand'ring sight.
11:1 δαδουχοσ {Greek dadouxos}
11:2 Atheneus, Lib. V. cap. 7.
Apuleius. Lib. II. Metamorph.
11:3 Fragments, added to Calmet's Dict.
Dissertation on the Caravans, taken from Col. Campbell's Travels in India.
12:1 Ib.
12:2 "The perfective part precedes initiation, and initiation precedes inspection."
Proculs. in Theol. Plat. lib. IV. p. 220.
12:3 Again philosophy may be called the initiation into the sacred ceremonies, and the tradition of genuine mysteries; for there are five parts of initiation. The first is previous purgation; for neither are the mysteries communicated to all, who are willing to receive them; but there are certain characters, who are prevented by the voice of the crier; such as those who possess impure hands, and an inarticulate voice; since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the mysteries should first be refined by certain purgations; but after purgation, the tradition of the sacred rights succeeds. The third part is denominated inspection. And the fourth, which is the end, fixing of the crowns: so that the initiated may, by these means, be enabled to communicate to others the sacred rites, in which he has been instructed; whether after this he become the torch-bearer, or an interpreter of the mysteries, or sustain some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship with divinity, and the enjoyment of that felicity, which arises from intimate converse with the gods.
Theo of Smyrna, in Mathemat. p. 18.
13:1 "I approached the confines of death, and treading on the threshold of Proserpine, and being carried through all the elements, I came back again to my pristine situation. In the depths of midnight I saw the sun glittering with a splendid light, together with the infernal and supernatural gods, and approaching nearer to those divinities, I paid the tribute of devout adoration."
Apuleius Metamorph. lib. III.
13:2 παςος {Greek pasos}
13:3 This month Athyr, according to the Julian year answers to November, or the winter solstice; but with the Jews, the month of Thamuz, when the solemnities of Adonis were celebrated in Judea, was in June, or summer solstice. The reason appears to be, that the Jews taking this month from the vague year of the Egyptians (and not from the fixed year) settled Thamuz in the summer solstice.
Selden. De diis Syriis.
Kirker, vol. I. p. 291.
13:4 ζητησις {Greek zhthsis} Plutarchus.
13:5 ευρεσις {Greek euresis} Plutarchus.
14:1 We must here observe that the fables were intended to convey more than one meaning; in proof of which we copy the following passage:
"Of fables some are theological, others animastical (or relating to the soul) others material, and lastly others mixed of all these. Fables are theological, which employ nothing corporeal, but speculate the very essence of the gods: such as the fable, which asserts, that Saturn devoured his children: for it insinuates nothing more than the nature of an intellectual god, since every intellect returns to itself. But we speculate fables physically when we speak concerning the energies of the gods about the world; as, when considering Saturn the same as time, and calling the parts of time the children of the universe, we assert that the children are devoured by their parent. But we employ fables in an animastic mode, when we contemplate the energies of the soul; because, the intellection of our souls, though by a discoursive energy, they run into other things, yet abiding their parents. Lastly, fables are material, such as the Egyptians ignorantly employ, considering and calling corporeal natures divinities; such as Isis, Earth, Osiris, Humidity, Typhon, Heat; or again, denominating Saturn water, Adonis fruits, and Bacchus, wine. And, indeed, to assert that these are dedicated to the gods, in the same manner as herbs, stones, and animals, is the part of wise men; but to call them gods is alone the province of fools and madmen; unless we speak in the same manner, as when from established custom we call the orb of the sun and its rays the sun itself. But we may perceive the mixt kind of fables, as well in many other particulars, as when they relate, that discord, at the banquet of the gods through a golden apple, and that a dispute about it arising amongst the goddesses, they were sent by Jupiter to take the judgment of Paris, who, charmed with the beauty of Venus, gave her the apple in preference to the rest. For in this fable, the banquet denotes the supermundane powers of the gods, and on this account, a subsisting conjunction with each other: but the golden apple denotes the world, which on account of its composition from contrary natures, is not improperly said to be thrown by discord or strife. But again, since different gifts are imparted to the world by different gods, they appear to contest with each other for the apple. And a soul living according to sense, (for this is Paris) and not perceiving other powers in the universe, asserts that the apple is alone the beauty of Venus. Of these species of fables, such as are theological belong to philosophers, the physical and animastical to poets. But they were mixt with iniatiatory rites, and the intention of all mystic ceremonies is to conjoin us with the world and the gods."
Salust, the Platonic Philosopher.
15:1 Orpheus, Hymn. Sol and Adon.
16:1 Kirker, Vol. I. p. 217. Vide Hide, Hist. vet. Persar. 113.
16:2 "The Egyptians began to reckon their months from the time when the sun enters, now, in the beginning of the sign Aries."
Rabb. A. Seba.
16:3 Why has he (Aratus) taken the commencement of the year from Cancer, when the Egyptians date the beginning from Aries?"
Theon. p. 69.
Herodotus (L. 2. cap. 24) says, that the statue of Jupiter Ammon had the head of a ram, Eusebius (Præparat. Evang. L. 3. cap. 12.) tells us, that the idol Ammon had a ram's head with the horns of a goat.
16:4 Strabo (L. 17.) informs us, that in his time, the Egyptians nowhere sacrificed sheep but in the Niotic Nome.
17:1 "Also Pindar, speaking of the Eleusinian mysteries, deducts this inference: "Blessed is he, who having seen the common things under the earth, also knows what is the end of life, for he knows the empire of Jupiter."
Clemens Strom. Lib. III. p. 518.
"Since in Phædo he venerates with a becoming silence, the assertion delivered in the Arcane Discourses; that men are placed in the body, as in a certain prison, secured by a guard, and testifies, according to the mystic ceremonies, the different allotments of pure and impure souls in Hades; their habits, and the triple path p. 18 arising from their essences, and thus, according to paternal and sacred institutions, all which are full of symbolical theory, and of the poetical descriptions concerning the ascent and descent of souls, of Dionysial signs, the punishment of the Titans, the trivia and wanderings in Hades, and every thing of the same kind."
Proclus, in Comm. of Plauto's Politics, p. 723.
18:1 Macrobius.
18:2 "We live their death, and we die their life."
Macrobius himself.
18:3 "The ancient Theologists also testify, that the soul is in the body, as it were in a sepulchre, to suffer punishment."
Clemens, Strom. Lib. III. p. 518.
18:4 "When the soul has descended into generation she participates of evil, and profoundly rushes into the region of dissimilitude, to be entirely merged in nothing more than into dark mire."
Again,
"The soul therefore dies through vice, as much as it is possible for the soul to die, and the death of the soul is, while merged or baptized, as it were, in the p. 19 present body, to descend into matter, and be filled with its impurity; and after departing from this body, to lie absorbed in its filth, till it returns to a superior condition, and elevates its eye from the overwhelming mire. For to he plunged in matter is to descend into the Hades, and there fall asleep."
Plotinus, in Enead. I. Lib. VIII. p. 80.
"O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
Rom. VII. v. 24.
19:1 He who is not able, by the exercise of his reason to define the idea of the good, separating it from all other objects, and piercing, as in a battle, through every kind of argument; endeavouring to confute, not according to opinion, but according to essence, and proceeding through all these dialetical energies, with an unshaken reason: he who cannot accomplish this, would you not say that he neither knows the good itself, nor any thing which is properly denominated good? And would you not assert that such a one, when he apprehends any certain image of reality, apprehends it rather through the medium of opinion than of science; that in the present life he is sunk in sleep, and conversant with delusions of dreams, and that before he is roused to a vigilant state, he will descend to Hades, and be overwhelmed with sleep perfectly profound?"
Plato, De Rep. Lib. VII.
19:2 The Egyptians called matter (which they symbolically denominated water) the dregs or sediment of the first life, matter being, as it were, a certain mire or mud.
Simplicius, in Arist. Phis. p. 50.
19:3 Lastly, that I may comprehend the opinion of the ancient theologists on the state of the soul after death, in a few words, they considered, as we have elsewhere asserted, things divine as the only realities, and that all others were only the images p. 20 or shadows of truth. Hence they asserted that prudent men, who earnestly employed themselves in divine concerns, were above all others in a vigilant state. But that imprudent men, who pursued objects of a different nature, being laid asleep, as it were, were only engaged in the delusions of a dream; and that if they happened to die in this sleep, before they were roused, they would be afflicted with similar and still sharper visions in a future state. And that he who in this life pursued realities, would, after death, enjoy the highest truth; so he who was conversant with fallacies, would hereafter be tormented with fallacies and delusions in the extreme: as the one would be delighted with true objects of enjoyment, so the other would be tormented with delusive semblances of reality."
Ficinus, De Immortalitate Anim.
Lib. XVIII. p. 411.
20:1 Plato mentions, that this Zoroaster twelve days after his death, when already placed on the pile, came again to life, which perhaps represented, if not something more abstruse, the resurrection of those who are received in heaven, going through the twelve signs of the Zodiac; and he says, likewise, that they hold the soul to descend through the same signs when the generation takes place. This is to be taken in no other way, than the twelve labours of Hercules, by which, when done, the soul is liberated from all the pains of this world.
Clemens, Strom. Lib. V. p. 711.
20:2 Apuleius.
20:3 Mocopulus, in Hesoid, Ptol. See Cudworth, Book. I. chap. 4.
"This God, whether he ought to be called that which is above mind and p. 21 understanding, or the idea of all things, or the one, (since unity seems to be the oldest of all things) or else, as Plato was wont to call him, the God, I say this uniform cause of all things, which is the origin of all beauty and perfection, unity and power, produced from himself a certain intelligible sun, every way like himself, of which the sensible sun is but an image."
Julian's Orat. in praise of the Sun.
"We see the unity (of God) as the sun from a distance obscurely, if you go nearer, more obscure still; and, lastly, it prevents seeing any thing else. Truly it is an incomprehensible light, inaccessible; and profoundly it is compared to the sun, to which the more you look the more blind you become."
Damascius, Platonicus, De Unitate.
The remains of the sectarians of Zoroaster, called now in Persia, Guebres, and who lead a miserable life, and more persecuted by the Mahomedans than the Jews are in Europe by the Christians, still perform their devotions, and say their prayers towards the sun or fire; but assert, that they do not adore them, only conceive them symbols of the Deity.
Vide Stanley, De Vet. Persar.
21:1 "The first God, before the being and only, is the father of the first God, who he generated, preserving his solitary unity, and this is above the understanding, and that prototype which is said his own father his son, one father, and truly good God . . . . This is the beginning, God of gods, unity from one, above essence, the principle of essence, essence comes from him, for this reason is called father of essence: this is the being, the principle of intelligence; these are principles the most ancient of all . . . . . . This intelligence acting or operating, which is the truth of the Lord, and the science, in as much as it proceeds in generating, bringing to light the occult power of the concealed reasons, is called in the Egyptian language Ammon; but in as much as it acts without fallacy, and likewise artificially with truth, is called Phta; the Greeks call it Vulcan, considering the acting or operating; in as much as he is the operator of all good, is called Osiris, who in consequence of his superiority has many other denominations, in consequence of the many powers and different actions, which he exercises."
Jamblicus, De Myster. Egypt.
22:1 The Hebrews call it שם חםפורש {Hebrew ShM HMPWRSh} Shem Hamphoresh.
22:2 See note page 14.
22:3 Porphyr. cited by Eusebius, De Præp. Lib. III. cap. 2.
22:4 Eneid. Lib. VI.
23:1 "In the sacred rites, popular purifications are in the first place brought forth, and after these those as are more Arcane. But in the third place, collections of various things into one are received; after which follows inspection. The ethical and political virtues, therefore, are analogous to the apparent (or popular) purifications. But such of the cathartic virtues as banish all external Impressions correspond to the more occult purifications. The theoretical energies about intelligibles are analogous to the collections; but the contraction of these energies into an indivisible nature, corresponds to initiation. And the simple self-inspection of simple forms, is analogous to epoptic vision."
Olimpiodorus, in Plato's Phæd.
23:2 Vide note page 18.
23:3 "The interpretation of the symbolic kind is useful in many respects; for it leads to theology, to piety, and to show the ingenuity of the mind, the conciseness of expression, and serves to demonstrate science."
Clemens, Strom. Lib. V. p. 673.
24:1 "For before the delivery of these mysteries, some expiations ought to take place, that those, who were to be initiated, should leave impious opinions, and be converted to the true tradition."
Clemens, Strom. Lib. VII. p. 848.
24:2 "Alexander gained from him (Aristotle) not only moral and political knowledge, but was also instructed in those more secret and profound branches of science, p. 25 which they call epoptic and acroamatic; and which they did not communicate to every common scholar. For when Alexander was in Asia, and received information that Aristotle had published some books, in which those points were discussed, he wrote to him a letter, in behalf of Philosophy, in which be blamed the course he had taken. The following is a copy of it."
"Alexander to Aristotle, prosperity.--You did wrong in publishing the acroamatic parts of science. In what shall we differ from others, if the sublimer knowledge, which we gained from you, be made common to all the world? For my part, I had rather excel the bulk of mankind in the superior parts of learning, than in the extent of power and dominion. Farewell."
Plutarch, in vit. Alex.
25:1 Aulus Gellius. Lib. XX. cap. 5.
25:2 "He is called Dionysius, because he is carried with a circular motion through the immensely extended heavens."
Orphic vers. apud.
26:1 "Indeed there are, as the saying is, many, who go into the mysteries: a multitude certainly of branch bearers (Thyrsirii) but very few Bacchians."
Socrates, in Plato; apud. Clemens Strom. Lib. I. p. 372.
26:2 Livii. Lib. XXXIX. cap. 8 and 18.
26:3 Lucian, in Demonat. tom. 2. p. 308.
26:4 Plutarch. De aud. Poet. tom. 2. p. 21.
26:5 Diogen. Lært. Lib. VI. § 39.
26:6 "A woman asked, how many days ought to pass, after she had congress with her husband, before she could attend the mysteries of Ceres. The answer was, with your husband immediately, with a strange man never."
Clemens, Strom. Lib. IV. p. 619.
27:1 As a proof of the sublime ideas of God, entertained by the Egyptian sages, in contradiction to these gross accusations., we copy the following passages, from the very Mercurius Trimegistus, as related by Pimandrus.
"The Artificer fabricated the whole universe with his word, not with his hands. He however has it always present in his mind, acting all, one only God, constituting every thing with his will; this is his body, not tangible, not visible, nor similar to any other: for he is not fire, not waiter, not air, not even spirit; but from him depend every thing good; however, such he is, as every thing belongs to him."
Again,
"But that you should not want the principal name of God, nor you should be ignorant of what is clear, and seems concealed from many; for, if it never appears, it is nowhere. Whatever appears only to your sight is created; what is concealed is all eternal; nor is it a reason why it should appear, as it never ends; he puts every thing before our eyes, but he remains concealed; because he enjoys an all eternal life: clearly he brings every thing to light, but he delights in the adytum; one, and uncreated, incomprehensible to our imagination (phantasia); but as every thing is enlightened by him, he shines in all and through all things; and yet appears chiefly to those, to whom he is pleased to communicate his name."
Again,
"There is nothing in nature that is not him; he is all that exists; he is even what is not; and what is, he brought into light. And as nothing can be made without a maker, so you must think that unless God is always acting, it is impossible for any thing to exist in heaven, air, earth, sea, in all the world, in any particle of the world, in what is as well as in what is not. This is with the best name, God; this, again, is the most powerful of all things; this, conspicuous in mind; this, present with eyes; this, incorporeal; this, as it were, multi-corporeal, for nothing is in the bodies that is not in him; because, he alone exists in all; he has all names; because be is the only father; so it has no name because he is the father of all."
Apud Kirker, Vol. II. p. 504.
28:1 Synesius, speaking of the Egyptian hierophant; observes thus; "they have χωμαστη`ρια {Greek xwmasth`ria}, which are arks, concealing, they say, the spheres."
See Plutar. De Iside and Orsiride.
28:2 Julius Africanus, a Christian Priest, by birth a Jew, made a short compendium of the history of Manethon, that the author himself might be dispensed with: this was about the year 230 of the Christian era. Finding that the Egyptian Chronology represented the world some thousands of years older than the chronology of the Bible, he so disfigured the dates of Manethon as to make him agree with the Bible.
Moreover, this work of Africanus is also lost, and we have only extracts of it, preserved in the work of a monk, generally known by the name of Syncellus, who confesses that he mutilated and altered Africanus. Now this individual not even had the original Bible, but only the Greek translation, which avowedly has the chronology vitiated; and yet Manethon's data were to be disfigured and interpolated, to make it square with the incorrect Greek translation of the Bible.
28:3 "Celsus seems to me, here, to do just as if a man, travelling into Egypt, where the wise men of the Egyptians, according to their country learning, philosophize much, about those things that are accounted by them divine, whilst the ideots, in the mean time, hearing only certain fables, which they know not the meaning of, are very much pleased therewith: Celsus, I say, does as if such sojourner in Egypt, p. 29 who had conversed only with those ideots, and not been at all instructed by any of the priests, in their arcane and recondite mysteries, should boast that he knew all that belonged to the Egyptian theology."
Origines, contra Celsum, Lib. I. p. 11.
"When amongst the Egyptians there is a king chosen out of the military order, be is forthwith brought to the priests, and by them instructed in that arcane theology which conceals mysterious truths under obscure fables and allegories."
Plutarch. De Iside, p. 354.
29:1 We will content ourselves, here with the authority of Kircher, one of the most learned antiquarians in Egyptian matters.
"Therefore, Hermes, that great author of the hieroglyphic doctrine, elucidating many things, chiefly about God, and his perfections, also of the creation of the world, and its preservation, of the administration of the same world and its parts, both by himself, and through his angels, as he heard of the Patriarchs about the government of the world, endeavoured seriously to penetrate these things: hence sprang a new philosophy in which as he treated of more sublime things than the ignorant could understand, he veiled under a new art, afterwards called hieroglyphic, which was hidden from rude understandings, not in wooden monuments, but in mystic figures, engraved in hard stones, for an eternal memorial with posterity; as a sublime science of things deserving eternal veneration, and worthy of being recommended to all; and in imitation of the great eternal Artificer, in the administration of the world, he so constituted his system, that it was communicated only to the select hieromists, priests, stolists, and hierogramatists, men of great genius, wise for the government of the state, according to the rules of administration, prescribed in the obelisks, and men who had shown ability and aptitude, and were moreover restricted, by oath, to keep it secret. By these means the priests, being looked upon by all with admiration, in consequence of their science in those new things, expressed in the symbols, were honoured by the multitude almost as half gods. But to increase this veneration they told the people many things about the apparitions of the gods, their answers, and how they were to be worshipped to sooth them and make them propitious: to this we must add the great profit they had by their machines and mechanical inventions and their skill in mathematics; and their making statues that moved their eyes and head, to express approbation or disapprobation: and that the miserable multitude was deceived and beguiled, paying always to obtain a favor from the gods, or to avert their anger. Hence it came, that in the course of time, that religion conceived by Trimegistus in a sincere sense, was by degrees degenerated into open and declared idolatry."
Kircher, vol. IV. p. 82.
30:1 "O Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion only the fables remain, and those incredible to thy posterity."
Trimegistus, in Asclepio.
30:2 The emigration of the Ionians to Asia Minor is mentioned by Herodotus, and others, but the epoch is fixed by various authors differently:
By Playfair in the year B. C | 1044 |
Gillies | 1055 |
Barthelemy. Anacharsis | 1076 |
30:3 "It is said, that the chief of the Ionian colony was Androclus, a legitimate son of Codrus, the king of Athens; so it is related, that the Ionians established their royalty; and those descending from that race, even now, are called kings, and enjoy their boners, that is to say, a place where they attend the spectacles and the public games, wearing the royal purple, and a staff instead of the sceptre, and the Eleusinian rites."
Strabo, Lib. XIV. p. 907.
This emigration is also mentioned by Herodotus, Lib. I. cap. 142, and 148; Aelianus, Lib. VIII. Pausanias, in Achaicis; Plutarchus, in Homero, Veleius Paterculus, in Chronico. Clemens, Lib. I. Strom.
31:1 Vide Strabo, above.
31:2 "Byblos was capital of Cinera, and there was a temple of Apollo, situated on an elevated spot, not far from the sea. Afterwards is the river called Adonis."
Strabo, Lib. XVI. p. 1074.
31:3 "Lebedos, was the seat and assembly of the Dionysian Artificers, who inhabit from Ionia to the Hellespont; there they had annually their solemn meetings and festivities in honor of Bacchus. Their first seat was Theo.
Strabo, Lib. XIV. p. 921.
The Latin translator of Strabo renders the Dionysian Artificers ( Διονυσιος τεχνε {Greek Dionusios texne}) scenicos artificers; because Bacchus or Dionysus was supposed to be the inventor of theatres and scena, derived from the Heb. שכז {Hebrew ShKZ}, to inhabit.
31:4 Polydor. Virg. de Rer. Invent, I. 3. c. 13.
31:5 Strabo, p. 471.
32:1 From the application of instruments of architectuure to morality, the Platonic and Pythagorean philosophers took not only types but words to explain our moral ideas.
For instance, a right man (rectus); obligation, from ligament (ligare) and from the same law (lex a ligare); to square our actions (quadrare) Justum aequum, &c. Rude mind, polished mind; from rude stone, and polished stone, &c.
32:2 The meetings or assemblies of the Dionysian Artificers went by various names, ( ας συνοιχια {Greek as sunoixia}) contubernium, which was the place of their meeting. The society was called sometimes συναγωγη {Greek sunagwgh} (collegium); ἄρεσις {Greek á?resis}; (secta); συνοδος {Greek sunodos} (congregatio) χοινος {Greek xoinos}; (communitas).
Aulus Gellius, Lib. cap. II.
32:3 See Chiseul, Antiquitates Asiaticæ, p. 95.
32:4 "This example imitated those Ionians who emigrated from Europe to the maritime countries of Caria (Asia Minor) and also the Dorians, their neighbours, building temples at a common expense. The Ionians built the temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Dorians that of Apollo at Triopii, where at a certain period they repaired with their wives and children, and there performed sacred rites, and had a market, likewise games, races, wrestlings, music-parties of different kinds, and made common offerings to the gods. When they had performed the spectacles and the business of the market, or fair, and fulfilled towards each other the duties of fellow creatures, if there was any litigation between the cities, they sat as judges to settle the dispute: moreover, in these assemblies they debated as to the war with the barbarians, and the means of keeping a mutual concord amongst the nations."
Dionis. Halicarn. Lib. III p. 229. edit. 1691.
33:1 "After this, the inhabitants of Ionia thought proper to apply to Cambyses, and having represented to him what was their business, the king ordered them into his presence, and asked who they were, and how they came to live in his dominions; and having examined and ascertained from whence they proceeded, he admired them, and chose rather that they should be erected into a society by himself, than to allow that he received such as coming from another country; for he thought it was not decorous to receive favours from others, who sojourned in his country, as if he would receive those services as pay for their habitations; and, therefore, to show this, dismissed them with presents, as marks of his munificence."
Libanius in Orat. XI. Antiochus. Vol. II. p. 343.
33:2 Robertson's Greece, p. 127.
33:3 Eusebius de Prep. Evang. L. III. c. 12. p. 117.
33:4 I Kings, chap. v.
33:5 The English translation of the Bible in I Kings c. v. v. 18 where the original Hebrew says Gibblim ( גבלים {Hebrew GBLYM}) or Gibblites, which means inhabitants of Gebbel, renders it, by the appellative, stone squares. The proof that this reading is not correct, is not only because of the different opinions of all other translations, which understand by this Gibblim the inhabitants of Gebbel; but that the same English p. 34 translation, in another part of the Bible, renders the same word by the ancients of Gebbal. (Ezek. ch. xxvii. v. 9.)
Now that Gabbel was the same as Byblos is clear; because the Septuagint version always translates this Gebbel for Byblos, and though there were several cities of this name, yet this one seems to be that which is between Tripoli and Berite; and still called Gebail.
In fact, Lucian, in his Treatise De Dea Syria, says expressly, that Gabala was Byblos, famous for the worship of Adonis.
34:1 For we find in Ezekiel these words "And I saw the women sitting weeping for Thamuz," that is to say, Adonis. Such, however, was what was done by the inhabitants of those cities, in testimony of which, they sent letters to women who were at Byblos, when Adonis was found, and afterwards scaled and thrown into the sea, they say they were spontaneously carried to Byblos; and, when arrived there, women ceased to weep for Adonis."
Procopius in Isaiah c. xviii.
34:2 Josephus Antiquit. Lib. VIII. c. 5.
34:3 I Kings chap. xi. v. 5, and 6.
35:1 Ezek. c. viii. v. 14. Thamuz signifies the name of a month, and likewise the name of an idol or divinity, which even in the opinion of St. Jerome is the same as Adonis. Plutarch says that the Egyptians called Osiris Ammuz, and from thence was corruptly derived the name of Jupiter Ammon. Robertson (Thesaurus Linguæ Sanctæ) says that the word Ammuz (read Ammoum) used by Herodotus and Plutarch, were corruptions from the Hebrew Thamuz (Hebrew תםוז {Hebrew TMWZ}). I would rather say that the word was originally Egyptian, and made Hebrew by the addition of the formative ת {Hebrew T}); and the more so, as Ammuz in the Egyptian language signifies (by the explanation of Manetho in Plutarch) something abstruse or concealed; which has an evident allusion to the concealment or symbolical death of Osiris or Adonis.
35:2 Mark. chap. xii. v. 18.
36:1 Thus in the numbers, 3, 5, 7, 12, 15 must have been preserved as essential. In the ceremonies, the symbol of death and resurrection; the crossing of the equinoxial twice, &c. In the time, the season of the year, when the sun arrives at the two tropics, the rising, the southing, the setting, &c.
36:2 Chron. chap. iii. v. 2.
36:3 See note page 10.
37:1 πετρωμα {Greek petrwma}
37:2 Vitruvius Lib. IV. c. 5.
37:3 "Justly, therefore, Plato knowing the world to be the temple of God, showed a place in the city where the symbols should answer."
Clemens, Strom. Lib. V. p. 691.
38:1 We shall here first quote the authority of the Jews on this point.
"Now let us consider what may be subindicated by the cherubim and flaming sword turning every way. What if this ought to be thought the circumvolution of the whole heavens?"
"But of the flaming sword turning every way, it may thus be understood to signify the perpetual motion of these (Cherubim) and of the whole heavens. But what if it be taken otherwise? So that the two cherubim signify both hemispheres."
Philo Judeus, p. 111, & 112.
"The tunic of the high priest since it was of linen, represents the earth; but the blue, the pole of heaven; the lightenings were indicated by the pomegranates; the thunders by the sound of the bells, &c. . . ."
". . . . But the two sardonixes, with which the pontifical garment is clasped, denotes the sun and the moon, but if any one wish to refer the twelve stones to the twelve months, or to the same number of stars (constellations) in the circle, which the Greeks called the zodiac, he will not wander from the true meaning."
Josephus, Antiq. Lib. III.
Now for the Christian Fathers:
"It would be too long to follow the prophetical and legal (statements) which have been expressed by enigmas: almost the whole of the divine Scripture offer up these sort of oracles.
"He who reasons properly will find sufficient for the purpose, we shall give a few examples. So for instance what the ancients told of the temple, the seven enclosures, which also refer to other things in the history of the Hebrews, and what was inside by the apparatus of divers Symbols, referring to appearances, signify in their composition what refers, to heaven and earth. They signify, then, what to the nature of the elements imports the revelation of God. For the purple comes from the water, the linen ( Βυσοσ {Greek Busos}) from the earth, the blue (hyacinthus) from the colour of the sky, as it is dark; the scarlet, the fire. In the middle, however, of the Temple was the veil, beyond which only the priests could go; there was the censer, symbol of the earth, which is this world, and from which exaltations takes place. But that place, which afterwards inside of the veil, where only the high priest had permission to enter, and that on certain days; the external court which was open to all Hebrews, they say was the medium between heaven and earth. Others say it was the symbol of the world, which is perceived by our intellectual senses. But the opening which separated the infidelity of the people, p. 39 was extended before five columns, and separated those who were in the court."
Clemens, Strom. L. V. p. 665.
This Christian Father explains these columns, by the following passage of Plato:
"Plato says we must contemplate these columns, and diligently see that no profane person dares to go there. Those are profane who believe that nothing exists, but what they can touch with their hands, but the actions and generations, and all those things, which we cannot see, in things which exist, are without number. Such are those who attend to nothing else beyond the five senses."
Clemens, Strom. Lib. V. "Now for the candlestick, which was placed on the south of the censer. By this was exemplified the motion of the seven planets, which have their motions in the south. For on each side of the candlestick were branches, and in them lamps; because, the sun also, as a lamp, is placed in the middle of the other errant (stars), and those which are above it, and those which are below it, by a certain divine harmony receive light from him."
Clemens, Strom. Lib. V. p. 666.
"Those things, however, told of the sacred ark, signify the world as perceived by the intellectual senses, which are occult and shut to the vulgar. Besides those golden images, each having six wings, they either signify the two bears, as some will have it; or, what seems more convenient, the two hemispheres. Indeed the name of cherubim signifies an extensive knowledge. But both have two wings, and thus signify the sensible world, and the time carried on by the circle of the zodiac."
Clemens, Strom. Lib. V. p. 667.
"But the 360 bells, pending from the long robe (of the priest) are the times of the year; for it is said, this is the year of the Lord, preaching and sounding the great arrival of the Saviour."
Clemens, Strom. Lib. V. p. 668.
"The two brilliant emerald stones, which are on the shoulder-piece, signify the sun and the moon, which are the helpers of nature. For is was supposed the shoulder to be the beginning of the hand. But those other twelve stones, which are disposed in four rows, describe to us the circle of the zodiac, and agreeing to the four seasons of the year."
Clemens, Strom. Lib. V. p. 691.
40:1 The first civil month of the Jews, called Tisri, ( תישרי {Hebrew TYShRY}) was from the Egyptain Misri, changing only the formative ט {Hebrew T} into ת {Hebrew T}. And the word was derived from יםר {Hebrew YMR} (rectum esse), as then the sun was in the equinoxial: and the Rabbins, to this day, call the equinoxial םישרי {Hebrew MYShRY}. The Greeks spelling badly the name called this Egyptian month ημυςορυ {Greek hmusoru}.
40:2 The number 12, which is that of the months of the year, and alluded to in so many types of the Temple, must have afforded also facilities to establish the system of the Dionysian Artificers; and therefore we shall give some idea of the heathen philosophy attached to this number, in the following extracts from Suidas:
"The great Demiurgos, or architect of the universe, employed twelve thousand years, in the work he has produced, and divided in twelve times the twelve houses of the sun."
Suidas, Art. Tyrrhenia.
"In the first thousand, he made the heaven and earth. In the second thousand, the firmament (expansion) which he called coelum. In the third thousand, he made the sea, and the water that runs on the earth. In the fourth, he made two p. 41 great torches of nature. In the fifth, he made the quadrupeds, animals that live on the earth and in the waters. In the sixth, he made the man."
"The first six thousand years having preceded the formation of the human race, it seems it will not exist but during six thousand years, which are the others to complete the period of twelve thousand, at the end of which the world will finish."
Suidas Ib.
Now if you take each sign of the zodiac for 24,000 years, you will explain the above mystery. When the sun comes out of Aries, or the spring sign, the world is said to be born; here the period of life begins. When the sun is in Cancer, or the summer, is the pleasure and delights of life. When in Libra, life has declined: after that all is winter of death; and from this arise the fables about the four ages of the world.
The books of the Persian Mythology explain to us the same meaning.
"Time is 12,000 years, it is said in the law, that the celestial people were three thousand years to exist, and then the enemy (Satan or Arhiman) was not in the world, which makes six thousand years . . . ."
"The thousand of good appeared in the Lamb, the Bull, the Taurus, the Cancer, the Lion, and the Sheep, which make six thousand years. After the thousand of God, comes the Scale (Libra), Arhiman came into the world (that is to say the winter)."
Boun Dehesh; translation du Perron, p. 420.
"Orsmud, speaking in the law, says, 'I made the productions of the world in 365 days:' it is for this reason that the six gahs gahambars (months) are included in the year."
ib. p. 400.
Astronomically speaking, there is no period or cycle of 12,000 years. But Dupuis has solved the mystery, by saying, that the periods of the ancient Indians and Chaldeans, answered to the series 1, 2, 3, 4, or 4, 3, 2, 1.
Thus the duration of the four ages of the world, according to the Ezour Vedan, were
1st age | 4,000 | years |
2nd | 3,000 |
|
3rd | 2,000 |
|
4th | 1,000 |
|
Memoirs de l'Academie des Inscript. tom. 31. p. 254.
The Baga Vedan counts thus, p. 41
1st age | 4,800 | years |
2nd | 3,600 |
|
3rd | 2,400 |
|
4th | 1,200 |
|
Total | 12,000 |
|
The Indians figured this system by a cow with four legs; or the number twelve, taken successively four times.
Another Indian period establishes the duration of the world thus,
1st age | 1,728,000 | years |
2nd | 1,296,000 |
|
3rd | 864,000 |
|
4th | 432,000 |
|
Total | 4,320,000 |
|
Now the smallest of these numbers (432,000) elevated to 2, 3, and 4, will give a sum total of 4,320,000.
The Indians say that the year of the gods is composed of 360 years of those of men; if you divide 4,320,000 for 360 you will have 12.
In the Chaldean period, as given by Berosus, we find the same numbers of 432,000, and to compose it, he follows the arithmetic order, thus:
1st degree | 12,000 |
2nd | 24,000 |
3rd | 36,000 |
4th | 48,000 |
5th | 60,000 |
6th | 72,000 |
7th | 84,000 |
8th | 96,000 |
Total | 432,000 |
42:1 The columns or pillars were denominated יכיז {Hebrew YKYZ} and בעז {Hebrew B!Z} the first signifies establish, from כיז {Hebrew KYZ} to establish or make firm; the second signifies in strength, from the proposition ב {Hebrew B} in, and the root עוז {Hebrew !WZ} strength.
43:1 "Now the Assideans were the first amongst the children of Israel that sought peace of them."
Maccab. vii. v. 13.
I should translate this passage differently, thus:
"And those, who amongst the sons of Israel were called Assideans, were the first of this assembly, and they wished to ask them peace."
According to this interpretation, by far more expressive of the text, it is seen, that the Assideans were a respectable body, for they were the first of that assembly.
In I Maccab. ii. v. 42, it is said, "Then came there unto him a company of Assideans, who were mighty men of Israel, even all such as were voluntarily devoted unto the law."
The very word Assidean or Cassidean is supposed to be derived from the Hebrew Cassidim, which in Psalm 78. v. 2. is taken in the sense of men pious, holy, full of piety and mercy.
43:2 "So for thousands of centuries, incredible to be said, this people is eternal, without any body being born amongst them."
Pliny, Lib. V. cap. 17.
43:3 Josephus, Lib. 13. cap. 19.
44:1 in προγονοι {Greek progonoi}.
44:2 "Before they admit any one who desire it, into their sect, they put him to one year's probation, and inure him to the practice of their most uneasy exercises. After this term they admit him into the common refectory, and the place where they bathe; but not into the interior of the house, till after another trial of two years; then they are allowed to make a kind of profession, wherein they engage by horrible oaths, to observe the laws of piety, justice, and modesty; fidelity to God and their Prince; never to discover the secrets of their sect to strangers, and to preserve the books of their masters, and the names of angels with great care."
Josephus, loco citato.
44:3 "They hold the soul to be immortal, and believe that souls descend from the highest air into the bodies animated by them, whither they are drawn by some natural attraction, which they cannot resist; and after death, they swiftly return to the place, from whence they came, as if freed from a long and melancholy captivity. In respect to the state of the soul after death, they have almost the same sentiments as the heathen, who place the souls of good men in the Elysian fields, and those of the wicked in Tartarus."
Josephus, loco citato.
45:1 Philo, Lib. V. cap. 17.
45:2 Some employ themselves in husbandry, others in trade and manufactures of such things only as are useful in time of peace, their designs being beneficial only to themselves and other men . . . . ."
"You do not find an artificer among them, who would make an arrow, a dart, or sword, or helmet, or cuirass, or shield, or any sort of arms, machines, or warlike instruments."
Philo, loco citato.
45:3 "Their instructions run principally on holiness, equity, justice, economy, policy, the distinction between real good and real evil; of what is indifferent, what we ought to pursue or to avoid. The three fundamental maxims of their morality are, the love of God, of virtue, and of our neighbour."
Philo, loco citato.
45:4 "the Essenians transmitted the doctrines they had received from their ancestors."
Philo. De vita contemplativa
Apud opera, p. 691
45:5 "They had distinguishing signs."
Ib.
45:6 "I shall say something of their congregations and how often they celebrated their banquets, &c."
Ib. p. 692.
46:1 Vide Iamblicus, de Vita Pythagoræ, cap. 17. and Basnage, History of the Jews, B. II. cap. 13.
46:2 Strabo, p. 471.
46:3 Psellus, quoted by Clinch, Antologia Hibernica, for January, 1794.